VALO H&W: New Hybrid Building Innovation
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
VALO combines a hotel and office into one space. The world’s first dual use building enhances customer experiences and preserves natural resources.
Offices and hotels waste energy by being mostly vacant. We utilise our spaces better with multiuse interiors yielding to different purposes throughout the day and providing an inspiring environment around the clock. Because our rooms can be both hotel rooms and offices, we’re sustainably in 24h use.
The first VALO opened in Helsinki.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
We dare to completely rethink how workspaces, hotels and leisure spaces could be used.
VALO Hotel & Work is an innovative combination of a hotel and an office that can be used for different purposes at different times of the day. Because our rooms can be transformed from a hotel room to an office room as needed, we are sustainably in 24h use.
Constructing and maintaining real estate produces approximately 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Buildings waste resources and energy while standing vacant for most of their life cycles. Offices and hotels are especially underused or vacant for large portions of the day. VALO solves this pressing issue of low utilisation rates while also offering new solutions for mobile work and lifestyles.
VALO is the world’s first true dual use building combining two completely separate businesses into one space. This is best illustrated by the VALO room module which can be transformed into a hotel room or an office depending on which customers inhabit the building at any given time. Office and hotel customers have different services at their disposal which are provided within the same spaces merely at different times. The dual use concept is only possible with specialised room modules, a digital operations platform and an app, all of which we custom built ourselves for this specific purpose.
Our dual use concept is evident throughout the building, not just in the rooms. By utilising multi-use furniture, we can adapt the purpose of all our spaces, such as a boardroom to a large hotel room, or extend their use, like transforming our grand staircase into an amphitheatre, with minimum effort.
VALO is attractive to businesses and business travellers in a unique way. The combination of the two services elevates both customer experiences with a feel of home and community, and creates a sense of familiarity and vibrancy.
Key objectives for sustainability
VALO Hotel & Work is a pioneering project offering an innovative solution to one of the most pressing sustainability issues in real estate, hospitality and business premises: low utilisation rates.
Office buildings have a staggeringly low utilisation rate of approximately 8% when considering their entire life cycle, while hotels have one of approximately 40%. Both buildings offer services that are tied to very specific, and opposite, times of the day. Bringing the two together to increase their utilisation rates seems only natural, and is made possible by creating multi-use, flexible spaces. VALO combines the two utilities into one space and is sustainably in use 24/7.
By introducing two entirely different user segments into one facility we can attain a much higher utilisation rate for the entire building and supporting facilities, including lobbies, wellness facilities and restaurants.
At the core of our innovation is the VALO room module which can be transformed from a hotel room to a workspace during routine room cleaning. Flexible room fixtures, including the bed, desk and sofas, can be respectively slid aside, conveniently hidden and pulled out within minutes. Lighting and temperature can also be adjusted to fit the chosen room mode. Other furniture such as office chairs were thoughtfully designed to seamlessly blend into both uses.
In addition to the dual use concept we’ve considered sustainability in all material and product choices, the energy we use and our aesthetics. To name a few examples, our main interior material is local and Nordic wood, with small additions of recycled plastics and wood chips. Our wellness area is heated geothermally, we use 100% green electricity and minimize our electricity use with presence detectors. Our cosmetics are provided in refill bottles from the Finnish eco-friendly natural cosmetics company Ole Hyvä. Our restaurants serve organic, seasonal, vegan food and sustainably sourced drinks.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Our design philosophy is based on feeling at home in a foreign place, and of experiencing an authentic Finland.
Modern brain work and business travel are often lonely. We are forced to spend such a large portion of our lives in places where we are strangers. VALO Hotel & Work is a home away from home, a place for community.
VALO is filled with Finnish design, high-quality details and well thought-out lighting. Though the atmosphere can differ dramatically between spaces, a harmonious whole is created with a soft colour palette and uniform materials. Most surfaces and furniture are made from local and Nordic wood, offering a wonderful tactile experience as well. Special care has been paid to timeless aesthetics and long-lasting furniture.
This feeling of home is the strongest in our hotel/office rooms. Though the room is very modern, the soft wood surfaces, quaint hook hangers and the minimalistic light fixtures create this sense of a Finnish summer cottage. The scent of wood plays a big role in that too. Our rooms are relatively small and create an experience of a private space. It’s a burrow of sorts where you can feel truly at home.
Our large enclosed courtyard with its 7-story tall glass windows and ceiling could be cold and distant, but is turned into something very familiar and communal with large wooden amphitheatre steps and pergolas. The layout and details were inspired by our neighbouring communal gardens, the oldest in Helsinki.
The experience of Finland is at its strongest at our open sky rooftop terrace where two hand-crafted log saunas await with the craftsman’s poems carved into the walls.
All our facilities are quite minimalistic, even neutral, in style. Both hotel and office services benefit from this calm and harmonious look. The design elevates the usual clinical look of workspaces and offers something new to hotel customers.
Key objectives for inclusion
The VALO brand hinges on inclusivity and the experience of community. We believe in open and honest communication and we dare to speak up about inequality and dsicrimination just as much as we do about sustainability.
We’ve considered a wide variety of customers in our facilities, especially people with disabilities. We have 11 accessible rooms that span the entire Deluxe room class. We also have accessible toilets in our lobbie. Our reception has one lower desk to allow customers of all sizes and those on wheel chairs to receive service on their eye level. All our meeting & event facilities and our public spaces have technical capabilities, such as induction loops, that help people with hearing impairments. All our elevator and building guide signs are also written in braille.
We aim to employ a diverse staff of e.g. genders, nationalities, religions and sexualities to include a wide variety of opinions, perspectives and experiences. Our recruitment process is in english and we welcome applicants of all backgrounds. Our back office is entirely digital, and our employees can work completely remotely. This opens up our job opportunities for a wider range of people.
Our organisation structure is based on a network model instead of hierarchy. This means every opinion weighs the same, and everyone is free to participate. Our employees actively exercise their right to speak their mind to our executives, a dynamic which plays a critical role in our company culture.
Results in relation to category
The first VALO Hotel & Work, located in Helsinki, is proof of concept and we hope the world takes note. This innovation is not only ours, it should be how we all build in the future.
VALO is the first building to prove it is possible to be a hotel at night and an office during the day. With this pioneering project we suspect dual use spaces will start becoming much more popular.
By giving underused supporting facilities, such as lobbies and lounges, new uses we’ve found they create new value for our business and our community as well. Our hotel lobby is just as well a dining hall during breakfast rush hours and a casual workspace during office rush hours. It has become a hub for all sorts of people, even our neighbourhood locals. Bistro ELO, the restaurant on our ground floor, has the rare chance to work around the clock serving breakfast, lunch, dinner and room service.
Our unusual collection of workspaces, over 400 private office and meeting rooms, serves modern work particularly well. As employees have started working diversely from several locations and on the go, companies end up wasting resources on increasingly vacant offices. At VALO the amount of workspaces a company has is determined daily by how many people show up. The concept preserves resources for our customers as much as it does for VALO.
Building facilities with the core principle of flexibility has also opened up entirely new services to us. When restaurants were forced to close their dining halls in lockdowns, we could transform our hotel/office rooms into safe, private dinner rooms and keep offering new experiences to our customers. When large events were banned, we could place event guests in safe numbers inside our rooms that overlook our enclosed courtyard where the event agenda took place. Our one person offices, cleaned daily by professionals, and digital interface remain safe in all situations.
How Citizens benefit
VALO Hotel & Work is under continuous development as we aim to offer the world’s best workday and sleep.
We recently finished a joint research project with the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and VTT about how our physical workspaces affect wellbeing at work and benefit brain work. The project included sensor data and customer surveys. During the project we optimised temperatures and air flow to better suit brain work and comfort, and afterwards further developed our app and our customer onboarding process to provide a better user experience.
Years before VALO opened we began a pilot sales project. The objective was to introduce our concept to target customers and learn what was loved and what should change about VALO. We also employed phone bookers to call potential customers and see what they thought about our dual use concept and the services we could offer within it. Throughout our pilot sales we showcased an incomplete product which we continuously developed according to feedback. The end product is in fact largely designed by our customers and their insights into what modern workspaces should be from business perspectives.
Though we’ve since opened and moved on to selling an existing product, the process is still ongoing. We’ve moved our existing group level organisation into VALO and utilise the office service just as our customers would. This has had a great impact on developing the concept forward. We’ve dramatically changed our membership models and our app among others with these learnings.
We know flexibility is as important in services as it is in facilities and maintain an active design and development process.
Innovative character
VALO Hotel & Work is a hybrid building innovation. By combining all relevant business services into one building, and by utilising the same space for hotel and office use, we significantly reduce emissions and waste. We’ve invested a great deal in innovating a way to combine two services into one space and creating a building that will have next to no vacancy periods.
The dual use concept is only possible with specialised room modules, a digital operations platform and an app, all of which we custom built ourselves for this specific purpose. We spent nearly 10 million euros and employed a team of 20 professionals from a variety of industries for up to 5 years developing the VALO concept.
With the help of a sister company responsible for our construction, we could innovate a room module that would have the extremely high level of soundproofing we were looking for, and would also sustain both office and hotel use. Together we also innovated a specialised bathroom module for VALO which wouldn’t waste square metres.
The transforming nature of our rooms also required specialised fixtures. Together with local producers we created a flexible room fixture that includes the bed, desk and sofas, all of which can be respectively slid aside, conveniently hidden and pulled out within a minute. We also redesigned traditional office chairs to seamlessly fit into hotel use. We innovated an entirely detachable upholstery for the chairs to lengthen their lifecycle. Textiles and upholstery in general usually wear down the fastest. The detachable upholstery can be repaired and replaced separately from the furniture itself.
No existing hotel operations system could successfully operate rooms that had two different modes, so we innovated our own. Our platform is mainly used by our operation to maintain rooms and keep track of room modes, while the app is our office customers' primary interface for booking and managing workspaces.
