For Immediate Release: September 22, 2008
Living the Brand - New Corporate Interiors for Select Comfort, Designed by HGA Architects and Engineers, Integrate Brand Imagery and Signature Product to Reflect Corporate Culture
Minneapolis, MN - Select Comfort®'s Sleep Number bed, along with the bed's digital-display remote control, enjoy corporate brand recognition that effortlessly combines the innovation and ease of high-technology with the intimacy and comfort of sleep. Designed by HGA Architects and Engineers, Minneapolis, the interiors of Select Comfort's new 168,646-square-foot corporate headquarters are infused with these aspects of the company's unique corporate culture.
"Our goal was to brand the company with its own products to reflect the its personality in the design of the interiors, so when people walk into the building they immediately get a sense of what Select Comfort is all about," says Rich Bonnin, AIA, architect, HGA.
Headquartered in Plymouth, Minnesota, the company's lobby includes a full-scale, prototype retail store, complete with beds, bedding, lighting and finishes, which is used for manager training. Print advertising featuring celebrity endorsements serves as artwork. Graphic shapes and symbols extrapolated from the Sleep Number bed's remote control serve as wayfinding devices on the glass fronts of offices and next to elevators throughout the four-story building: the second floor is marked with the a digital-number graphic; the third with the up/down arrow; the fourth with the shape of the remote control.
On the upper floors, Sleep Number mattresses are interspersed among the offices and workstations. "The company wanted its product integrated throughout the building, even in the accounting department, to remind employees about the seriousness of their work: to help people sleep better," Bonnin explains. "The marketing department, for instance, has easy access when they need photography of a mattress. But I've also seen people sitting on the beds, working, with papers spread out around them. These employees are living the brand."
Brand integration was just one of the guiding principles for workspace design HGA created for Select Comfort's interiors. Another principle was designing comfortable interiors that foster innovation and creativity.
Because Select Comfort's most-popular product, the Sleep Number bed, is an intimate product that resides in one
of the most private areas of a home, "the company wanted a warm, comfortable-but not necessarily residential-aesthetic for the interiors," Bonnin adds.
The interiors' contemporary yet comfortable aesthetic includes a fireplace in the lobby, patterned light-toned wood walls, soft walls of textured fabric, and glass-fronted offices. A conference room of light-toned wood and glass cantilevers over the lobby, with views through the lobby's floor-to-ceiling windows of the wetlands beyond. Furnishings meet McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry's Cradle-to-Cradle sustainability certification, meaning they were fabricated from environmentally safe and healthy materials that can be easily recycled for maximum embodied-energy efficiency.
Another of HGA's guiding principles for Select Comfort's interior design was to promote interactive, collaborative teamwork across work functions. This principle manifests in the programming of team-oriented office spaces along a central "spine" to form department neighborhoods. The principle is also evident is the design of a gymnasium for the employees.
While in its former headquarters, a partially renovated warehouse, the employees of Select Comfort installed basketball hoops in the building's unused cavernous spaces and created company basketball leagues.
"They play. They're serious. They have tournaments," Bonnin says. So in the company's new headquarters HGA designed "a full gymnasium with pull-out blue bleachers, a wood floor and basketball hoops," he explains. The gym also doubles as a full-company conference center, with technology integrated for Internet access and interactive programs.
Select Comfort's new offices and meeting areas reflect the company's serious dedication to developing products that improve sleep, while a new gymnasium reflects the company's sense of fun.
:: View Select Comfort Corporate Headquarters
HGA Contact: Julie Luers (612) 758-4000 e-mail JLuers@hga.com
Media Contact: Susan Evans, Evans Larson (612) 338-6999 e-mail susan@evanslarson.com