British Columbia receives its first WELL certified workplace courtesy of Perkins + Will

The Vancouver office of CBRE Group, Inc. has recently become British Columbia’s first WELL certified workplace for new and existing interiors. The project was awarded gold level certification based on IWBI’s WELL Building Standard.

In achieving the gold level certification, CBRE’s Vancouver office incorporated over 100 wellness features. A staircase interconnects the four adjoining floors and promotes physical activity across the building. To nurture the innate human-nature connection, each floor includes a living tree that adds a biophilic element to employee surroundings. Additionally, a unique wood ceiling in the café was designed as an inverted topographic map of Vancouver meant to add warmth to the space and celebrate local culture.

“At CBRE, we believe that the workplace environment should and can actively benefit the health and well-being of employees, not diminish it,” says Loren Bergmann, CBRE’s Western Canada Managing Director of Workplace Strategy in a release.

The Vancouver CBRE office marks Perkins + Will’s first WELL certified project in Canada. The WELL building standard focuses exclusively on human health and wellness in buildings. It measures, certifies, and monitors building features that affect human health and wellbeing in seven categories: air, water, light, nourishment, fitness, comfort, and mind.

The Harvard studies on the unintended effects of open office defines it as space where 'one entire floor was open, transparent and boundaryless… [with] assigned seats,' and the other had 'similarly assigned seats in an open office design, with large rooms of desks and monitors and no dividers between people's desks.'