93 Rewilding the office

Rewilding the office

Garden plots, beehives and bird watching—the latest office perks are upleveling biophilic design.

Employees at Nuveen, an investment company headquartered in midtown Manhattan, can help harvest honey on their lunch breaks on a terrace surrounded by high-rises. The company installed two beehives as part of a $120 million renovation concluding in 2021, hiring a beekeeper to care for the bees and give employees lessons in honey harvesting.

Springdale Green, a new development in Austin, Texas, is reimagining the office with bird blinds and hammocks, and surrounded by native plants and woodland. The office is “more outside than inside,” Philip Mahoney, executive vice chairman at commercial real estate company Newmark, told the New York Times.

Employees who work at the Victor Building in Washington—recently renovated by Brookfield Properties—can pick herbs such as parsley and basil from rooftop vegetable gardens before heading home to cook dinner.

Uber’s new headquarters in San Francisco, opened in March 2021, features a major design element to provide fresh air: 180 14-foot-tall glass panes open and shut throughout the day, counteracting stale recirculated air and bringing some of the outdoors in.

Why it’s interesting “The overarching trend of the past five years has been the hotelification of the office,” Lenny Beaudoin, an executive managing director at CBRE, told the New York Times. Over the next five years, expect to see this shift to the “outdoorification” of the office as companies bet on nature as the future of office design.