Having worked extensively on several projects in Barcelona, Cairo, Dubai and Abu Dhabi before relocating to Athens and establishing Epitomēe Design, I realized the importance of Brand Identity.

According to my experience, in most European markets, Brand Identity is an all-inclusive concept that encompasses Interior Design as one of its most significant components. Specifically, the role of Interior Design is to convey the Brand Identity philosophy in all spaces, physical and digital alike.

LinkedIn Omaha | Source: gensler.com

Regardless of the office/store size or decorating choices, Interior Design should always be a natural extension of the Brand and the guiding light of all your related decisions. However, as far as materialization is concerned, Interior Design can often come with added complexity.

Thus, a Brand Style Guide is a necessity for all companies, big and small alike, since it is a rulebook that helps you present yourself to the world in a visually consistent way. It represents your company’s personality and aspirations.

Define your Brand’s core values. How can you visualize them? What has worked for your Brand in the past?
How do other Brands inspire or influence you? As you can see, inspiration is everywhere.
In addition, make sure to involve key people in your company in this creative process.
And last but not least, keep track of everything that inspires you and fits your vision for the future.

Booking.com Toronto | Source: gensler.com

Introduce your Brand to the world. A clear-cut summary will give people insight into the heart and soul of your company.
Define your Mission (why your company exists), your Vision (where you position your Brand in the future) and the company’s Values.
Determine your target market: what is the audience that interests you (who your customers are or would like to be).

Space: determine how to fill in the ambience (positive and negative space)
Light: decide how you balance natural and artificial light and how you play with shadows
Lines and forms: Structural features and the space’s furnishing influence the feel. Horizontal, Vertical or Diagonal lines can be very dynamic.
Colors: create an atmosphere: cozy, romantic, calm, dynamic. Colors  should always match the Brand’s image.
Texture and Patterns: create the atmosphere of the space. Graphic, geometric and/or natural patterns make a huge difference in the environment. Rugs, carpets, textiles, and furniture bear a connotation on the Brand Image.
Décor: choose how do you decorate the space? Is it minimal? Is it with pieces of art? Color or plain? Elements of nature? Flowers /plants?

Adobe Campus Renovation, California | Source: gensler.com

Once you’ve gathered your inspiration, it’s time to start working with a designer; start putting it all together. Choose a designer who, besides being talented, makes you feel comfortable and who understands what you are trying to achieve.

Brand Design is a discovery process, and your designer will be your companion during that journey. Combine your talents for a contemporary yet timeless design, and the outcome can only be successful.

Cover Photo: Coca-Cola Northpoint Experience Tour Brand Design, Houston | Source: gensler.com

Part of the famous ‘Golden Triangle of Art’ in Madrid, the Thyssen Museum  is the one I fell in love with during my extended stay in Spain. Each visit inside its majestic 18th-century building, the former townhouse of the Dukes of Villahermosa, feels like going to an art history lesson. Wandering through its 1,000 paintings, spanning the history of art from the 13th to the 20th century, one can admire a work by El Greco and Caravaggio and a second later be enchanted by Willem de Kooning’s colors and Jackson Pollock’s unique style.

Athina Triantafyllou

(Founder & Design Director)

The product of Pritzker-prize winning architect Jean Nouvel’s
unique vision, Louvre Abu Dhabi is an impressive modern museum surrounded by the Arabian Gulf’s waters. Its 55 rectangular buildings are covered by a specially designed metal dome, consisting of 7,850 geometric stars of various sizes, to allow natural light to penetrate, simulating a ‘rain of light’. Its collection, presented across 6,400 square meters of galleries, includes ancient archaeological findings, decorative arts, neoclassical sculptures, paintings by modern masters and contemporary installations. The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s strong connection to Paris is evident in the 300 exhibits on display from the Louvre and other prestigious French museums.

Maria Tsamasfyrou

(Business Development Manager)

The Daniel Libeskind designed building is distinguished by an emblematic monumentality. At the same time, it is a composition of paths and spaces that lead to a profoundly spiritual experience for the visitor. Through it, the very concept of the museum is re-approached. The space feels like a composition of fragments and the path through all the stages of mourning one experiences to reach the acceptance of the loss and the collective trauma. A visit to the Jewish Museum  can be intense as what is sought through the movement in the building is to meet the essence of the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Neli Koutsandrea

(Architect)

Designed by Zaha Hadid, MAXXI is a showcase of stunning modern art. Located on a former military barracks site, the late architect designed it “like an ode to the multiple layers of history on which Rome was built”. Regarding the building’s interior, thin concrete beams and glass coatings have been placed on the roof, allowing natural light penetration. The stairs with the linear lighting are impressive, leading the visitors to the museum’s third level, ending in the large window with a view of the city.

Maria Gialesa

(Junior Architect)

The Heraklion Archaeological Museum is one of the oldest and most important museums in Greece, and among the most famous museums in Europe. It houses representative artefacts from all periods of Cretan prehistory and history, covering a chronological span of over 5,500 years from the Neolithic period to Roman times. The Heraklion Archaeological Museum prides itself for its unique Minoan collection, which includes the masterpieces of Minoan art. It is rightly considered as the Museum of Minoan Culture par excellence.
This beautiful museum is in the town center; it was designed by the architect Patroklos Karantinos and was built between 1935 and 1958 on a site previously occupied by the Venetian monastery of Saint-Francis. The ruins of the monastery, destroyed by an earthquake in 1856, are visible in the museum’s garden.

Evily Sakkalis

(Operations Coordinator)

Built in baroque style in 1712, the historic Belvedere is one of the leading museums worldwide. It consists of two separate buildings, the Upper Belvedere and the Lower Belvedere, with luxury being evident everywhere as it was initially intended, as the summer residence for Prince Eugene of Savoy. Equally impressive are the majestic gardens that connect the two buildings. Its famous art collection includes works ranging from the Middle Ages to today. Highlights include the world’s most extensive collection of Gustav Klimt paintings (including “The Kiss”). Make sure to check out the interesting periodic exhibitions hosted at Lower Belvedere.

Maria Tsamasfyrou

(Business Development Manager)

The Copernicus Science Center’s exciting feature is its mission to make the search for knowledge and sciences accessible and fun. The building is located on the banks of the Vistula River. On its two floors, it hosts many interactive exhibits, experiments, games, and laboratories that cover all scientific fields and applications of technology. Its shell is lined with vertical panels in seven different colors that alternate, giving the feeling of a three-dimensional puzzle as one approaches the entrance.

Neli Koutsandrea

(Architect)

An impressive postmodern construction of glass, copper, and concrete, designed by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamaki and Ilmari Lahdelma. POLIN’s Core Exhibition is a journey through 1,000 years of the history of Polish Jews – from the Middle Ages until today. The building’s central feature that leaves all visitors speechless (me included) is its cavernous entrance hall. Similar in shape to a gorge, it references the crossing of the Red Sea by the people of Israel, known from the Exodus.

Maria Gialesa

(Junior Architect)

A museum, unique to Greece, that pays tribute to the industrial past of the Cyclades capital. The permanent exhibition consists of 307 rare documents about Ermoupolis’ industrial heritage, including maps, the original Ernst Ziller architectural designs of the island’s neoclassical city hall and restored machines, accompanied by several tools, and equipment, raw materials and industrial products. It consists of the Katsimantis Dyeworks building, the Aneroussis Lead Shot Factory building, the Velissaropoulos Textile Factory building and the Kornilakis Tannery building. Among the museum’s, one can also see the first legendary electric car Enfield 8000, constructed in Greece in the 70s

Evily Sakkalis

(Operations Coordinator)

Islands such as Santorini are already climbing even higher on the cosmopolitanism index, with new Michelin-starred restaurants, new premium hotel chains and new small boutique hotels-architectural masterpieces changing the landscape.

What does this mean for the average hotelier, the average tourist accommodation owner or the average home owner who wishes to thrive in a competitive and ever changing environment?

Simply that he no longer has the option to remain idle. In the tourist industry, stagnation equals suicide.

Based on our long experience in the renovation of tourist accommodation of all sizes in Greece (Athenian Riviera, Spetses) and abroad (Barcelona, ​​Cairo, Dubai and Abu Dhabi), we at the Epitomēe Design, suggest the following steps:

• Analysis of the accommodation needs according to modern tourism trends and environmental sensitivity. Analysis to identify problems and improve facility functionality and propose changes – add uses and benefits.
• Feasibility study, budget and detailed project plan.
• Investigate the possibility of the inclusion of the project in a subsidized program.

• Updating the license file and accommodation classification with the corresponding organizations
• Issuance of building permits
• The Accommodation needs a clear and Exclusive Concept; that will create a strong competitive advantage for the business owner.
• Implementation of a strict and very detailed project plan for all the stages of the renovation. The result will be optimal Time and Resources Management.
• Energy upgrading of the building
  Please do not consider this upgrade to be a luxury; it is now a necessity and a requirement of a increasing number of premium travelers.

And one last, very important step: do not close your ears to the demands of the times, just when Greek Tourism is in the phase of taking off. Listen carefully, collaborate closely and act now.

What are the vital changes that need to be implemented, due to Covid-19,  for company offices to safely receive back their employees? 

One of the elements that the pandemic has admittedly highlighted is that much of the office activity can be transferred home just as effectively. And indeed, few feel “nostalgic” to return to the daily traffic jam that accompanies our commute to work. 

However, the consolidation of work from home in our lives highlighted, at the same time, its apparent limitations. Proving that an organization’s success still depends on face-to-face cooperation between its members, with the office remaining a necessary core of any critical activity. 

This finding concerns the office as a concept. As a matter of reality, the office will never – after the end of the pandemic – return to the same form and layout that it had before. Several companies abroad have already understood it, immediately making the necessary adjustments and renovations to achieve the new functionality at the dawn of the new regularity we are going through. 

Another paradox is that while the pandemic in the short term will theoretically lead to a reduction in the necessary square meters needed for a company to operate since part of its staff will be on permanent work from home status, in the long run, its needs for additional space will be more significant to meet the new health guidelines. 

In both cases, the renovation of the business premises becomes a one-way street and an urgent priority. With business leaders called upon to find the solution to the intractable equation of what they need to do to make the most of their space and their employees’ time. Obviously, each space is unique, and each business has its own needs, which you must consider when planning the renovation. Those standard features that emerge are the following: 

Considering that in the future, a large portion of the staff may work from home on certain days, companies should take into account in their plans that any given space at their disposal may not be filled with the same people at the same time. Hence it is necessary to invest in hotdesking , devoting specific work desks to the people who will take turns in them. Equipping them, also, technologically with the ability to have easy access to shared files and everything else they need for their smooth operation. 

The era of large and luxurious meeting rooms, in which it was possible to gather most employees, seems to be over. According to the relevant research, those spaces, which were rarely used effectively anyway, will give way to smaller meeting rooms with brainstorming multi-purpose logic that, depending on the requirements, can be used either for meetings or as supplementary work desks. 

Except for the company’s critical staff (president and senior executives), for whom the need for a closed personal office continues to apply, all other offices are likely to fit into the broader open space philosophy. Either in the same logic, we knew all these years or with the addition of phone booths (small personal offices from Plexiglass in the shape of enlarged telephone booths). A necessary condition for each office is to have the required distance from the other, both for health and purely psychological reasons. Something that was not currently the case with companies – for financial reasons – tending to place one office next to the other. 

Excellent and frequent workplace ventilation is now and will continue to be a key priority for any business in the coming years. In terms of renovation, it translates into full utilization of the windows that each space has and the removal of spaces and offices that do not have access to it, with the possible exception of specialized isolation areas for those employees who may show symptoms of illness. 

The only certain thing is that the office of 2025 will have nothing to do with that of 2020. And that only those organizations that realize it and take the relevant measures will emerge victorious. 

In the new hybrid era emerging, the office maintains its fundamental value in terms of the workplace model that will prevail. As long as it is flexible and efficient. 

The same digital transformation that has allowed many companies to survive the pandemic is the one that will help them enter the realm of the hybrid workplace model that is clearly going to prevail. 

An “experimental” model in which each entrepreneur will be asked to decide what suits the needs of his own business and what helps his employees be more productive. On the other hand of the same equation, for the first time in history, more employees than ever will have the option of working from home (with all the advantages and disadvantages that it entails).  

If there is one thing sure in the midst of the ocean of uncertainty that we all face, it is that we will never go back to the concept of work and office the way we knew before the pandemic. The sooner we realize this, the faster we will recognize and take advantage of these increased mobility opportunities. 

 Although it is too hasty to draw reliable conclusions, the preliminary international surveys reveal that people still prefer to work in the office, although they now have other options. Just with more autonomy and flexibility than before. The main reasons for this are: 

The existence and diffusion of corporate culture and philosophy, which has been proven to positively affect the overall business performance, creativity and cohesion of a team, is obviously more manageable with the office at the core of corporate activities. An atmosphere of cooperation and enhancement of employees’ personal development is easier to create when employees of all levels coexist in the same -specially designed- open space (and especially in public areas, the value of which stands out even more). No matter how many days a week, these employees choose to use the office.

Sometimes you need to lose something to appreciate its value. This is precisely what is happening right now with the so-called “lost time” before a meeting starts and the five-minute unexpected encounters in the hallway or in the kitchen where employees could talk about the TV series they saw last night or a detail about a project that one member did not know. These valuable dozens of small interactions, which helped build trust in a way that is not possible through zoom, ultimately prove to be the reason why even companies that – organizationally and technologically – do not need it are expected to choose for their employees to coexist in the office a few days a week. It makes it even more necessary to redesign these spaces to meet the new health protocols and enhance creativity by creating many small multipurpose meeting & brainstorming rooms.

It is true that, in the short term, working from home boosts productivity as in-house workers end up working longer hours and, virtually, with no precise hours. However, in the long run, the non-existence of a specially designed- office, as a meeting place and coexistence hub of the team, ends up steadily decreasing productivity. Employees start to feel like outside partners, rather than organic parts of the group, showing signs of psychological fatigue from diffusing the boundaries between their personal and work lives.