The office remains, but its role is evolving. As ways of working diversify, the headquarters is becoming less a place where everyone occupies the same workstation every day and more a professional living environment where collaboration, focus and informal exchanges coexist. In designing Kastello’s new offices in Brossard, blanchette archi.design translated this shift into an environment of nearly 4,000 square feet, conceived to support the real estate investment firm’s growth without diluting the culture it had built at a smaller scale. A compact project in which spatial organization, identity and materiality work in concert to give the office a value that extends beyond its function alone.
When Kastello set out to leave premises that had become too small for its growing team, the change of address also marked a new chapter in the company’s evolution. The new headquarters needed to reflect its maturity, its stability and its growing presence in the real estate sector, while preserving the closeness and family character that had until then defined its day-to-day life.
“We wanted to create a stimulating workplace that truly reflects Kastello’s DNA: a family-oriented, friendly and unifying culture, while offering a high-performance environment where the team can be efficient day to day. The goal was to strike the right balance between the human, warm side of the company and a functional workspace that allows us to keep growing,” explains Mathieu Collette, Partner and Vice-President, Real Estate, at Kastello.
Growing Without Losing Closeness
In the former offices, this closeness came almost naturally. The space, smaller and largely partitioned, was mainly occupied by large enclosed offices, a conference room and a modestly sized kitchen. Opportunities to collaborate, meet or simply change settings over the course of the day were limited. By gaining in floor area and structure, Kastello paradoxically risked losing what the smaller scale had produced naturally: spontaneous encounters and closeness among colleagues.
For blanchette, the project had to recreate these conditions intentionally. “We like to understand the reasoning behind the brand identity, but also to fully understand the company’s culture,” explains Sarah Arsenault, Project Director and Senior Interior Designer. Before even drawing the spaces, the firm looked closely at employees’ actual presence in the office, their tasks, their needs for focus or collaboration, and the different types of encounters that punctuate their days.
“The common areas, the kitchen, the conference room and the lounge are well positioned to encourage exchanges and more informal moments. Conversely, the workspaces are strategically located to benefit from as much natural light as possible while being set apart from the busier zones. It creates a great balance between collaboration, conviviality and focus,” notes Mathieu Collette.
This analysis gave rise to a greater diversity of environments. Employees who are on site every day have more generous assigned workstations, while more mobile colleagues use unassigned workstations with personal storage. A sitting area, banquettes and collaborative spaces, for their part, make it possible to choose where to work depending on the task or the time of day.
Doing More with 4,000 Square Feet
The program was ambitious for a relatively contained floor area. Kastello wished to keep several enclosed offices, integrate a gym, create a large conference room for about ten people and offer more spaces dedicated to meetings, collaboration and informal exchanges.
Rather than simply adding functions, blanchette sought to multiply the possibilities offered by each zone. The offices of the two executives thus incorporate a small meeting table, additional seating and audiovisual equipment that allow them to become small meeting rooms when needed. Elsewhere, the sitting area, the large banquette, the central island and the lounge-style spaces have been equipped to accommodate a break as readily as an individual or group work session.
This versatility makes it possible to get more out of every square foot without multiplying specialized rooms that would sit unused for part of the day. It also contributes to a vision of the headquarters in which the value of a space is measured less by a single function than by the diversity of situations it can accommodate.
Giving Shape to Culture
Kastello’s identity provided the team with another key to organizing this diversity. As the company’s name evokes the castle, blanchette focused less on its aesthetics than on its spatial logic. Courtyard, rampart, tower and outer town informed a reflection on thresholds and on the gradual transition from collective spaces to more intimate zones.
The plan is thus organized around three degrees: public and social, semi-public and collaborative, and private and conducive to focus. “The codes need to be clear for someone who is new to the space, so they can easily understand where the thresholds are,” says Sarah. Materials, lighting, furniture and greenery signal these thresholds without systematically resorting to partitions. At the centre, a core conceived as the “castle” houses, among other things, the large conference room; its corners evoke towers, while an arch and large double doors discreetly extend this vocabulary.
Materiality also expresses Kastello’s personality. “Jovial professionalism,” an expression the company uses to define its culture, inspired a balance between restraint and spontaneity. Dark walnut, navy blue, travertine and brown marble form a sober base, punctuated by orange, intense blue, metal and greenery. Even the checked carpets were born of a personal observation: their pattern recalls the checked blazers often worn by clients, while echoing the imagery of the Scottish castle.
“Very quickly, they understood our vision and, above all, translated it concretely into the plans. They created a stimulating work environment that reflects who we are, while developing a beautiful common thread around Kastello’s name and identity. You can feel that real thought went into every space, and the result tells our story without overdoing it,” says Mathieu Collette.
The Headquarters as a Showcase
For a company active in real estate investment and management, the quality of its own work environment takes on particular significance. Clients and partners also operate in a sector attentive to the quality of spaces and their execution. The headquarters thus becomes a concrete expression of the values Kastello wishes to associate with its own projects: attention to detail, quality of construction and care for the experience of those who occupy the premises.
This rigour extends even to the simplest interventions. In the conference room, blanchette created the effect of a skylight by grouping, above the large table, standard light panels typically integrated into suspended ceilings. Clustered together, these everyday elements become an architectural device that contrasts with the room’s dark envelope and diffuses light throughout the space.
“We aim to create a scenography: what do we bring to the fore, and what do we want to see less of? At blanchette, we like lighting to be comfortable for users while retaining a theatrical dimension,” sums up Sarah.
The trust Kastello placed in the design team made it possible to push these ideas further while quickly testing them against the realities of construction. Bringing general contractor Manovra on board from the design phase notably allowed construction methods, costs and schedule to be validated on an ongoing basis, without losing sight of the project’s ambitions.
With Kastello, blanchette thus envisions the headquarters as a professional living environment as much as a working tool and a showcase. Within a contained footprint, the project gives shape to different ways of working, to relationships between colleagues and to the culture of a company in full evolution. The office perhaps gains its most contemporary function: offering a reason to be together.
Team:
Interior Design: blanchette archi.design
General Contractor: Groupe Manovra
Engineers: Pageau Morel et associés
Photography: Alex Lesage
Lighting Fixtures: EDP + Lumigroup
Architectural Partitions: LDMA
Millwork: MNVR
Materials Used:
Cellulose Wallcovering: Woods Collection by Momentum
Travertine Wall Tiles: Moruzzi Surfaces
Beige Carpet: In the Deep – FLOR by Interface
Tartan Carpet: Pattern & Symmetry – Karastan by Mohawk Group
LVT Flooring: Port Collection by Stone Tile
Resilient Flooring – Gym: Mondo
Marble Countertop: Dark Emperador by Better Marble
Furniture: Cime environnement d’affaires
Accessories and Rug: West Elm
