A Look Inside Eastlight Community Homes...

by Nick Nolan

Date

October 6 2021

Read length

4 min

Eastlight Community Homes’ new office in Braintree, Essex is a striking workplace and community hub that reflects the wants, needs and aspirations of a modern housing association. Vibrant, flexible and collaborative – the new office supports hybrid working, offers an array of choice and occupies just one third of its previous space.

Scott Bridge, Housing Services Director at Eastlight Community Homes said “Early on in the project we anticipated how Covid might change things forever – we knew that a greater focus on sociability and collaboration would be needed and because of that our office space features a coffee bar, lots of soft furnishings, touchdown spaces and activity-based work settings. We hope this will encourage our service users to stay and forge better relationships with us.”

“For us hybrid working is about recognising that work doesn’t have to take place in the office and that when it does, it wont be just head down working. We know that our people and service users need something more collaborative, dynamic and engaging”

Nationwide interior design business Claremont was instrumental in helping Eastlight to understand their needs and deliver a fantastic space.

Sarah Syson, Associate Director, Head of Design said “Embracing hybrid working enabled Eastlight to dramatically reduce their space requirements – instead of occupying three floors, it’s now one. One of the un-used floors has been turned over to community users, which shows the value Eastlight puts on being a local resource. Eastlight recognised the opportunity for change and the need to create a special purposeful and flexible space before the pandemic – but they used Covid to turbo-charge their change. The result is fantastic.”