Plus Company/Cossette Campus
location: Montreal, Canada
client: Plus Company inc.
Photos by Raphaël Thibodeau
The Challenge
Following a lease at WeWork during pandemic, Canadian ad agency Cossette and its parent corporation Plus Company formulated an ambitious agenda for change: to reunite its Montreal workforce in a single downtown campus and attract remote workers back to the office. The opportunity arose when Shopify vacated one its floors at 525 Viger Ouest, near Old Montreal. Cossette invited LAAB to reboot its workplace to go beyond hip design features and the ubiquitous foosball. The keenest insight came from their shared focus on UX design: to reshape its offices around the staff experience, rather than from management’s point of view. The new layout flowed naturally from this stance.
The Response
The result is a workplace environment crafted around the agency’s work culture and ethos; the spaces were then organized around the requisites of their creative vocation.
The bistro emerged as the hub of workplace culture: a social condenser, meeting place and relaxed work area. It was given the choicest location with a breathtaking view of Square Victoria. The hotel-like circulations provide an infinite variety of lounges, nooks, and meeting spaces to service an infinite range of tasks and interactions. The previously siloed Shopify pods were opened along the exterior wall to promote informal travel between teams and give greater access to views and light. The award-winning Club Cossette installation was relocated along the visual axis of McGill, magnifying the city’s kinetic movement and evoking the Silo no5 in the background. Upon arrival, the reception desk is wrapped with a mysterious dichroic and mirror envelope, lending it a mutable coloration shifting with the viewer’s position, a subtle reference to Plus Company’s multicolored logo, its inclusive culture, and its nuances of creative services.
BRANDSCAPING, DESIGN & INNOVATION, EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Market(s)
Selected Press Release
Kollectif : Project of the Month, September 2024
Canadian Architecture + Twenty Change 2024: New Perspectives - October issue