On a February site tour, 365 Bloor St. E.’s glossy white entrance was still a work in progress, but it already bore the markings of its new identity. “Postmedia” was imprinted in block lettering against a translucent background on the lobby reception desk.
In August 2012, the company inked a 15-year lease agreement with Greenwin to take over five storeys at 365 Bloor St. E., as well as rebrand the building Postmedia Place. By October 2012, the company had completed the sale of its then head office/National Post building at 1450 Don Mills Rd., with a lease-back agreement to remain in the building until its new head office was ready for occupancy.
Applying the net proceeds of the $23-million sale to paying down debt was a clear benefit to relocating, but it was not the driving factor. As Craig Barnard, senior vice-president, Postmedia, explained in a March interview, the relocation was highly strategic.
“It was really about moving the business in a new direction and changing the culture from the old, traditional print to the new media/digital world,” Barnard said.
The company wanted to be closer to its ad agencies and advertisers downtown, as well as attract young, new media talent, he added.
Tim Bristow, senior vice president of Collier’s International’s Office Practice Group, assisted the company with site selection. Bristow conducted a geographic information study (GIS) to pin down a suitable location, keeping proximity to public transit in mind.
Trendy King Street East and Liberty Village were quickly ruled out. Not surprisingly, coming from suburban North York, a central downtown location made the most sense for the most employees. After looking at a few options, including 75 Eglinton Ave. E. (slightly too small), Postmedia landed on 365 Bloor St. E., steps from Sherbourne subway station.
“(They’re) in a Triple-A media row with Rogers and Shaw,” Bristow said in a March interview. “It’s right for (their) brand to be on Bloor.”
Not only did the move meet Postmedia’s location and space requirements, but it came with the attractive opportunity to become the building’s anchor tenant and get the associated signage rights, Barnard said. Greenwin gutted the floors Postmedia now occupies, giving it carte blanche to build its new space from scratch.
Enter Joanne Chan, principal of SDI Interior Design & Project Coordination.
Postmedia wanted to convey the image of a professional media company focused on accuracy and speed-to-market, Chan said during a February site tour. Google came up as a reference point for attracting young talent, but it didn’t serve as a template for the design (read: exposed ceilings, minus on-site mini putt).
The biggest shift for the 600 employees stationed at Postmedia/National Post’s head office was moving from traditional, private offices to a modern, open-concept work environment. Private offices are now largely for senior management, she said.
The company was also downsizing from 150,000 square feet to 80,000 square feet. Even though the company’s former head office had single-use and wasted spaces, offices and workstations needed to shrink.
Some employees moved from 10-by-15-feet offices to eight-by-eight-feet offices, Chan said. Others moved from six-by-eight-feet workstations to five-by-six-feet workstations.
The larger, private workstations have P-shaped tabletops, which allow users to invite others to pull up a chair for a meeting, she said. Space savers at the smaller workstations included elevating flat-screen computer monitors with arms and providing pencil drawers instead of pedestals. Plus, less space would promote Postmedia’s goal of reducing paper use, she added.
Rather than extending the workstations by a foot, Chan said, she preferred to provide generous corridors, where the extra inches would have the biggest impact. And employees have access to collaboration spaces ranging from standing-height storage drawers to meeting rooms with writable glass boards.
Employees are organized onto floors by their department. Floors three, four and five share the same basic palette of grey and white. Distinct core colours and custom Interface carpet tile are differentiating features.
The third floor, home to the National Post, got a gold carpet motif matched to its masthead colouring; the fourth floor, which brings together the integrated advertising, marketing and research teams, features a lime green carpet decal; and the fifth floor, sporting bold red chevrons, is the touch-down space for sales.
On the National Post’s floor, editors have small offices in addition to their workstations, which gives them private space for heads-down research and confidential conversations with sources, Chan explained. The company also installed a gas generator on the roof to support its news operations.
“It doesn’t matter if the world shuts down,” she said. “People still have to print papers.”
“The gas generator supports the server room, the data centre and the editorial floor — the critical stations.”
Naturally, technology played a major role in the fit out of the new facilities, too.
A digital signage program was developed to promote connectivity between different departments on different floors. The Collaboration Café, which spans half the 11th floor and accommodates large company gatherings, is equipped to webcast quarterly town halls to the company’s daily newspapers — including its outposts in Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Regina, Saskatoon, Vancouver and Windsor.
The Collaboration Café can easily be broken into its smaller components, as well.
Modeled to conjure a “modern cottage” vibe, Chan said, the cafeteria features communal tables and rustic chandeliers. A mesh curtain can be pulled across the café space to divide the cafeteria from the adjacent reading lounge, which has boxy chairs paired opposite one another and a wooden display case spread with a selection of Postmedia’s daily newspapers.
Restaurant-style booths surround the perimeter, as do wall-mounted, flat-screen HDTVs. The other half of the 11th floor is occupied by accounting and IT.
The executive offices are up on the 12th floor, which blends a crisp white palette with dark chocolate accents. The glass-paneled offices and meetings rooms are frosted at the sight line for privacy.
The live-edge boardroom table has built-in microphones and a webcasting camera that shoots both ways. These features enable executives to do a media release or give a speech to investors from the space, Chan said.
Following the move, which took place over five weekends starting in December, 2013, Postmedia was still making final adjustments to its space. A branded ground-floor café was to come later, also to be designed by SDI Interior Design & Project Coordination, and so was the external signage.
If all goes to plan — and so far it has, Barnard said — the sleek space will serve as a symbol of Postmedia’s successful transition from traditional print media into a new digital era.
Michelle Ervin is the editor of Canadian Facility Management & Design.
Photo by Robert Watson Photography.
