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Beyond The Fringe At Benfield Greig / Canadian Interiors

By Martha Uniacke Breen. Photography by Elaine Kilburn

Intercede Facility Management bestowed exuberant, almost madcap, flights of fancy to the Toronto office of a British re-insurance company.

The young, British-born insurance company Benfield Greig Canada sees itself as a rebel in the button-down world of insurance. Practitioners of an arcane subset of the industry known as re-insurance, the firm provides insurance for insurers in high-risk or large-scale policies. Perhaps because of its special niche - and not least as an antidote to the inevitable stress associated with such work - the firm approached Micheline Bartlett and her team at Intercede Facility Management to create a decidedly unstuffy home for its new 9,200-square foot Toronto branch. Cubicles and walls were out; communication, informality, comfort and colour - the less sober the better - were in.

Intercede has an impressive track record for creating progressive spaces for companies in traditional fields. Rogers Cable has been a client for years; Canada's largest developer, Oxford Property Group, recently commissioned Intercede to transform its 80,000- square-foot head office. Spar Aerospace and Xerox Canada have used Intercede's services as well.

Bartlett, who started Intercede in 1981, is a corporate design veteran. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art, she is a past president of the Toronto chapter of the Houston-based International Facilities Management Association. "We've always specialized in corporate design, but recently we've gravitated toward clients who want to reinvent themselves with a different corporate culture than just the staid-and-standard norm. We have a lot of fun working with people who are open to new ideas."

The Intercede team included Maria Biber and Sandra Ho. Benfield Greig offered them little in the way of detailed instructions, saying only that it wanted something open, flexible and stylish, and that it should encourage a sense of community among the branch's 12 employees. The project started with a trip to Benfield's head office in London, England, which is contemporary and informal. "They wanted the Canadian office to have some consistency with the parent in style," Bartlett says. "So we tried to emulate the character and mood, even though it was quite different in the specifics.

The building provided great raw material. A brand new office-condo near the comer of King and Jarvis Streets in downtown Toronto, it featured an elegant facade of brick and stone, and a certain High Street elegance with its covered entrance and corner decorations. When the project began, the building was only partially finished. The Benfield workers, moreover, were dividing their time between Toronto and another branch in Vancouver, and were for the most part unavailable to consult on details. Thus, the project was a designer's dream, Bartlett says. Here was the chance to fashion a space completely from scratch, right down to choosing the dishes for the servery.

Bartlett started with a pair of theme colours, a clear royal blue taken from the client's logo and a deliciously rich French-pea-soup green. These two colours repeat throughout the space. Curving swaths, irregular blocks and a mottled combination of the two shades sweep across the carpeted work area, continuing unbroken under the glass walls that enclose the few confined spaces. Some of the walls are painted French pea; tables and bar surfaces are royal blue; upholstery fabrics feature patterns using both tones. And overhead, fashionably exposed ductwork, partially hidden under curved cutaway drop ceilings, is painted in the same vibrant blue.

From the moment you step off the elevator, the design suggests that this isn't just another boringly tasteful Canadian insurance company. The lobby is smallish and vaguely residential-feeling in its proportions, with olive walls (darker, but complementary, to the signature French pea), multicoloured slate flooring, and comfortable upholstered chairs. The elevator doors open directly across from the receptionist, who greets visitors from behind a sleek, stainless-steel and curly maple desk in the centre of the far wall. Overhead is the first of several subtle tweaks to convention that pop up engagingly here and there. A striking, giant oval light fixture, tinted with pale-blue gels and featuring horizontal vanes, swims across the ceiling like a giant sea creature.

The main workspace, with its curving, royal blue and French-pea carpeting and glass-walled rooms, has a coherence that makes the space feel more expansive than it actually is. Even the boardroom is encased in glass, the better to make workers, within and without, feel connected to the action.

Glass also encloses the few other rooms needing definition, and even then, as if to make up for their segregated nature, each such room features its own, generally unconventional, design personality. A quiet room, used for private conversations and solo work, features the word "quiet quiet quiet" rimming the walls at chair-rail height. One of several employee lounges, known informally as the Rumpus Room, is like a day-care centre for grownups, with its crayon-coloured leather chairs and groovy Orbital standing lamp from Mille Luce. Other glass walls feature the company's initials marching across their width.

The Benfield principals didn't want the executive offices to be radically different from those of the rank and file, even though for practical reasons they did need more space and privacy. Bartlett came up with a solution that was as practical as it is attractive. Knowing the clients collect art, she divided the executive workstations from the rest of the office with parallel gallery walls running down the centre of the space. The maple-covered walls have stainless-steel accents. Adjustable hanging wires enable art to be admired and moved around as the mood strikes.

For regular workstations, Bartlett specified Knoll's Currents system. She likes its attractively simple design, fitted out here with translucent, shoji- screen-inspired panels. The accounting and clerical area is, by necessity, a little more conventionally conceived than the free-spirited areas further front, but the denizens' comfort and happiness are no less important. Work areas, enclosed within a single large corral of Knoll half-walls, are placed at roughly regular intervals, but no two are configured exactly alike. White anti-glare canopies above the computer terminals enhance an unassuming sense of territory. The canopies' graceful curves of stretched canvas remind one of multiple Flying Nun's habits.

Another, more formal lounge, for client and staff meetings, sits deeper within the space. Unlike some of the other defined areas, it has no walls; glass or otherwise. Instead, enclosure is suggested with a black Steelcase Conjunction post-and-beam structure and by the carpeting, where blue, pea-green and mottled blue-green ovals overlap to create a freeform area rug. The chairs are upholstered in a kicky, 1950s- style fabric; they surround a boomerang-shaped coffee table. The area is a cross between a conference room and an extremely high-end rec room. Bartlett played down the standard meeting-room components (hanging whiteboards, writing surfaces attached to the chairs, facilities for plugging in electronics).

Downtime seems to be important to this client, whose field involves, by necessity, a high amount of stress. Workers can relax in the cafe-cappuccino bar. The same colourful slate flooring used in the lobby separates the cafe-bar from the rest of the space. A stainless-steel central counter dominates the cafe with industrial-chic diagonal crossbraces along its glass sides.

For all its exuberant, almost madcap, flights of fancy, Benfield Greig's Toronto quarters imparts a surprising degree of visual cohesiveness. The combination of glass, open areas and the occasional actual, opaque wall blurs a sense of proportion. Indeed, when the designer took me on a tour, I was surprised that we had travelled in a circle back to the lobby.

"I like the great sightlines in this place, and there's a strong sense of continuity even though no one visual idea exactly repeats," Bartlett says. "And I like that there is a sense of the company to it. In fact, when the chairman of Benfield Greig visited here from England, he gave us a big compliment. He said it was more London than London.

Sources
Art fran-iing: Liss Gallery
Carpet: Mannington Commercial
Custom ceiling and signage: Europtimum
Custom millwork: Diamond Brothers, Space
Fabric: Designtex, GBS
General contractor: Vermont Management
Hardware: Trillium Architectural Products
Lay-in ceiling: CGC Ceiling Systems
Lighting: Cooper Lighting, Lightolier
Mechanical and electrical engineer: Hidi Rae
Seating: Allseating, Steelcase, Amat
Stone flooring: Jana Stone Consulting
Tables: Nienkamper, Arconas, Space
Wallcovering: Crown Wallcovering
Workstations: Knoll

Above: Benfield Greig's elegant, almost homey reception, with its striking slate floor, maple reception desk and matching company insignia on the wall behind, and the blue-gelled light fixture which floats like a great whale overhead.

At top: Glass walls, some emblazoned with the company initials, allow views from one end of the office to the other. Middle: Maple gallery walls display the principals' art collection and provide an unobtrusive division of territory. Bottom: The Rumpus Room, with its goofy Mille Luce lamp and crayon-coloured leather chairs.

Above: The cappuccino bar is a study in smooth/rough textures, stainless and perforated steel surfaces and the company's signature royal blue. Like other informal areas in the space, it's livened up by brightly coloured accents, such as hanging blue pendant fixtures and a backlit display shelf of coloured glasses.

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