Allsteel | Gunlocke Chicago Showroom Achieves WELL
To foster wellness and enhance user experience, the Allsteel | Gunlocke Showroom utilized WELL Building Standard practices to improve key components that have the greatest impact on the health of our visitors—indoor air quality, access to clean water, natural light, healthy foods, and the promotion of fitness, comfort, and mindfulness.
Why We Pursued WELL
To us, the WELL concepts are intuitive; like the WELL Building Standard, Allsteel and Gunlocke believe in designing for humans. We consider what workers need to work in a healthy and productive way, and how to support them physically, mentally, and emotionally.
We design products to fit people, including their physical needs, like body shape and size, as well as their expectations about how they want to work. Ergonomics is a core design criterion, along with choosing healthy, low-emitting materials. From individual to group environments, work settings can enhance a person’s emotional well-being. We have thoughtfully designed the space with wellness principles in mind, allowing spaces for community and respite, providing access to healthy air and natural light, and giving users ways to connect with nature.
What is WELL?
The WELL Building Standard® is the first building standard to focus on the health and wellness of building occupants. We spend over 90% of our time indoors, so focusing on the built environment can help drive improvements in our overall health and wellness. Developed by Delos and administered by the International WELL Building Institute, WELL was designed using evidence-based medical and scientific research to create built environments that support human health and wellbeing.
WELL version 1 includes seven “Concepts,” or categories of impact relevant to occupant health in the built environment. The Concepts include: Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Fitness, Comfort, and Mind. Within each Concept are Features to pursue. Mandatory features are called “Preconditions,” while optional features are called “Optimizations.” Projects can achieve WELL Silver, Gold, or Platinum, depending on the number of Optimizations they achieved.
Allsteel was an early adopter of the WELL Building Standard, earning the first WELL Certified™ Gold – Retail Pilot award in the world for our Los Angeles Showroom in 2017. Since then, we’ve achieved WELL Certified™ Gold – Retail Pilot for both our Boston and Chicago showrooms. The Retail Pilot is a version of the WELL Standard that applies to retail spaces where products are on display; where there might be few full-time members, but many visitors. The Retail Pilot has a few less requirements to meet in the Nourishment, Light, Fitness, and Comfort concepts, but other rigorous criteria must still be met.
