Vocon’s Tom Vecchione Is Ahead of the Changes in Office Design

New York City’s office market has ebbed and flowed a lot over the past 40 years, but Vocon’s Tom Vecchione knows how to navigate the shifting seas.

Whether it’s revamping old Gothic trefoils into stained glass-like windows, figuring out ways to utilize older office footprints for tech tenants, or even starring in reality TV shows like “HGTV Design Star,” Vecchione is constantly evolving his design strategy to keep up with rapidly changing trends.

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Vecchione, a vice chairman and a managing principal at Cleveland-based architecture and design firm Vocon, has been in the real estate biz for almost four decades now, including a nearly 32-year stint at Gensler and nearly seven years at Vocon since joining in 2019.

New York has always been his stomping ground — from growing up on Long Island with big architecture dreams to now living on Park Avenue with his longtime partner, Tom Baione, who leads research and archives at the American Museum of Natural History.

Commercial Observer sat down with Vecchione last month to discuss how evolving technology will affect the modern workplace, as well as Vocon’s current projects and how the firm is adapting to new tenants and new demands.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: How would you say office design has changed the most over the last few decades? What have been the biggest changes?

Tom Vecchione: That’s such an interesting question. When I first graduated from Cornell and came out to work in the late 1980s, I took a year off and went to Europe, but, when I came back, I started with Gensler. I spent my career there. I loved my time there, because it was the architecture of business. It wasn’t very big back then — it was just a few offices — but they focused a lot on tenants, designing workplaces and designing office space.

I know it’s hard for all of us to imagine, but, back in 1988, there was no concept of the “workplace.” It was just the office. It was office buildings and office space. I remember when we were brainstorming and invented the idea of the word “workplace” at Gensler, probably in the late `90s. We were working with senior law firm partners, senior banking people, and we were talking about their growth and how they were building their organization and the amount of offices.

So it was interesting, because I learned really early on about the business because of that. Even though it was about space and we talked about offices, the idea of business was always in the mix. So that was a very unique starting point, being at Gensler with that kind of workflow. 

But it was offices — it was wood panels, it was the boardroom. There was a certain methodology to it. There was always a beautiful plaza on Park Avenue that you walked up to. Everybody wore a suit back then, and there were no cafes or amenities. There was the pantry and a pot of coffee. And so it was just a very formal construct.

Think about all the industry sectors that weren’t there yet. There wasn’t the technology sector there. There was advertising, working professional services, but they were very similar to professional services in style, with offices in a suit — so the creative world, the tech world, all of the venture capital, they didn’t exist when I first came out into the world of office space. Seeing all the new industries that have flowed into New York has completely reshaped the identity of what office means. Their influence on how they work changes how you think about the office.

But then there’s the next generation of talent, the level of people coming in that had more of a spectrum of skill sets — finance mixing with tech, creative mixing with tech. You had a changing demographic of talent, too. What that means for design is as businesses change, design differently.

So I went through that whole ecosystem of it’s not all about offices. It’s more about amenities. It’s more about hospitality. And with the wave of what happened with the technology influence from San Francisco coming here in 2000 or a little earlier — that was the biggest shift, when we really understood what was happening in California, and what was happening with the Googles and the larger tech firms out there amid the California lifestyle, and how workplace was about work life, and that really flowed into New York. 

That was a huge shift. You had a different demographic of people coming into the workforce. You had outside influences, and you had new kinds of companies, so those forces of change really shifted in the `90s.

And that’s where they left us, with that deep-rooted sense that workplace is about talent. It’s not about capacity. It’s not about, “I gotta fit 300 people.” It’s about, “I’ve got to attract the best talent. I’ve got to support their work-life balance. We’ve got to integrate new technologies.” 

Following the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of hybrid work, how have tenants’ needs changed?

It’s interesting. The psychology of the workplace has changed. The value of curb appeal, experience and brand was always around before COVID-19. There was that part of the technology model of experiencing the company through the physical workplace, but now there’s more of an emphasis on hosting. There’s more of an emphasis on a larger coffee bar in the front of the space. There’s more of an emphasis of, if you’re in three days a week, I’m coming into the office for learning, I’m coming to the office for social, and I’m coming into the office for collaboration.

So the emphasis around aspects of design has changed since COVID. Everybody wants a more compelling workplace. You want to bring people back. I get to work with so many founders of companies. They all sort of say the same thing: “Tom, help us to design a workplace that people want to come back to.” I think that means various things.

There’s the piece that’s comfortable work environments, places of choice, lots of different areas to work in, a brand experience, amenity spaces that support multi-programs of learning, training and social. We want to create great places so people can do great work and want to be there, versus just, “I want to create a high-performance workplace for only work.” That’s one piece.

Hybrid work is interesting because it’s changed our relationship with technology, and it’s changed our relationship with how we interface and collaborate. It’s really changed the nature of how we communicate.

There are four models of workplaces now that have sort of arisen out of COVID. There’s first place, which is the office, which is workplace. There’s second place, which is home. Third place is the coffee bar. And fourth places are really dynamic cultural places, like people going to libraries to work, people going to museums to work, people going to sit on the High Line to work. So there’s actually a new, emerging working model that’s remote from the office that’s starting to gain attention in cultural institutions. Why not work at a museum?

It used to only be the office back in 1988, and now it’s three places plus an emerging fourth place.

What would you say is your own personal approach to design?

The first and foremost thing is from leadership, or from who leadership anoints as being part of the process of designing office space. What’s the vision? Is the vision high-performance growth? Is it new product lines? What’s the business and cultural vision? 

The premise that I start with is that conversation to really understand what we’re driving toward. I’m very analytical driven, in the sense that we do have a checklist of metrics, but we start with the vision and the business culture and where the organization sees itself going over the life of this real estate investment.

Another thing is that the idea of time has changed. We have clients saying, “What do we need to implement in six months?” I was just with a client, a fashion brand, and the CEO founder was like, “I don’t really want to sign seven-year leases. I don’t know where my business is going to be in seven years. AI might take away the creation of certain things that I do with people.”

This idea of a timeline has changed. New York City is all about real estate. Everybody wants a piece of it. New buildings in the world are going up, prices are skyrocketing. So that’s all there. In the middle of all that, there is an interesting conversation about how long businesses are willing to wait for change.

So I have more and more clients that are saying they love New York and they want a piece of it, but also their timelines around their business and investments have changed.

Are you working on any office spaces at new development projects? How do you approach those projects?

Half the practice in my office is focused on tenant work, workplace design, workplace strategy, and helping those tenants find buildings. We have a big analytical piece where clients and brokers come to us and they say, “We’re looking at three buildings. Tom, can you analyze them and help us pick one?”

There’s that whole workplace side, but then we have a very big division of real estate reposition. We just recently completed the old CBS headquarters building, or Black Rock. We’re doing 99 Park Avenue. We’re doing 200 Madison for George Comfort. We do a lot of lobbies and amenities and making assets valuable. We added amenities into One Vanderbilt — we just did the club space under the observation deck. We’re always adding to buildings to make them generate excitement and position them for tenants.

When we did One Madison, which we completed a while ago with SL Green, we were designing the lobby and amenities, but we were also strategizing around their block of space and thinking about how we could give them two private entrances, how we could give them a second-floor innovation hub.

I’m doing something with Hines down in Hudson Square. The same thing where we’re analyzing big blocks of space that owners have to curate for potential big blocks of tenants. We don’t always do the big blocks of tenants. We have great clients, but it’s like 30,000 to about 150,000 to 200,000 square feet. Our niche is working with top executives, working with founders of firms, and kind of that scale. And, then, sometimes, like with Black Rock, we’re filling up six floors. We positioned it, and then the tenant came to us to do it.

The consumers are all of our clients that want workplace and want us to design workplace. And that’s one side, that’s 40 people. That’s our SWAT team. 

Then, the other side, 40 people, are the teams that build the product. They’re the ones working on the repositionings. They’re the ones working on cleaning up buildings. They’re the ones putting new entrances on the office building. They’re curating the product, and we’re working with the consumer, and we share that knowledge between both. We learn a lot on the consumer side with tenants about how landlords think of their buildings, and we learn a lot on the consumer workplace side of what landlords should be doing to their buildings.

What’s the difference between pre-COVID and post-COVID? The negotiation world between tenants and owners is the biggest change, because now they sit at the same table. The relationship and what ownership and tenants are sharing or doing for each other has completely changed. They used to be separate — they were church and state.

And the tenant improvement allowances, obviously, to ownership’s chagrin, have increased for tenants to build better space. So that financial relationship has grown because land ownership is now more responsible in a changing economy of high cost of construction to deliver both prebuilt space and building standard space. TI allowances have really become a big conversation in the world of the relationship between tenants and owners.

Construction and material costs are up. How does that affect how you work with clients?

It’s a really big topic. Right around COVID-19, I had a few great deals with some very good firms in New York that were saying, “You know what? We believe in New York, we’re going to take the space.” This is probably 2020, early on in COVID-19. There were great construction prices because nobody was building anything. Then people started coming back, and there started to be a race to real estate again.

And then there’s obviously the tariffs and the high costs of oil and a lot of other things. I think people are shocked. I’m close to the construction industry — they’re all our collaborators — and they’re trying their hardest to deliver the best for their clients at the best value. I have nothing but admiration for the construction industry in New York, because it’s hard to work here and it’s hard to get talent, it’s hard to build. So those guys are in a class league of their own.

But I think clients are shocked at prices. My approach is to get in front of it and not get behind it. I try my best to push for understanding the budgets. With clients, it’s kind of this chicken and egg thing, because often they want to see what they can get and see if it’s worth the physical value of it, and then it’s priced. And then there’s this dialogue of sticker shock. What we try to do is come up with a menu — what you want out of your workplace, the layout, the metrics and the vision.

It’s interesting. I just went into a project, and the client actually came up with this idea and said, “Tom, let’s start the project with a low, medium, high.” A lot of architects do three design concepts — like, you can do a warm wood one, you can do an industrial chic. You can do complementary contrast modern. You start the conversation around design with three ideas around look and feel. But we started, in this case, with three ideas around low, medium, high pricing. And I thought it was really successful.

What other projects are you currently working on in New York City?

I am very passionate about repositioning work. I’m passionate about New York. I love when people hold on to their buildings and refresh them. I think it’s just a very sustainable way of thinking about space, and I like when there’s a new awareness of a building. There’s a little bit of a treasured New York story about that.

I’m totally proud of the CBS Building, or Black Rock, repositioning. That’s been a huge success. It’s almost fully leased. It’s a beautiful building. It’s exquisite to be able to work on a building with such a history.

One of my favorite projects is 15 East 26th Street for Rockrose, and that’s this little jewel building on Madison Square Park. We put two buildings together. 

We took these two, probably early 19th century 20-story buildings and put them together and created a larger building. And we did a new lobby. We did this fabulous roof deck and a beautiful conference center on the roof. And then what we did with the Landmarks Preservation Commission — because we work closely with Landmarks, and we’re very user friendly — we took the Gothic trefoils and we took out all of the inside carvings, and left the Gothic tracery, like you would in stained glass. We created these beautiful windows, and that was just a fabulous product. We also did a whiskey bar. We did a really nice gym. 

We’ve had incredible success in that building, which was always in a nice location. We doubled its size. Great tenants have looked at it. The leases have gone up in value. They’ve had a huge increase in the demand for the building and value of the building.

99 Park Avenue is another one. It’s a fabulous building on East 39th and Park Avenue, and it’s close to Grand Central. It’s all leased up, and we redid the lobby. It has a little bit of an Art Deco feel. We did this beautiful lobby and a stair going down to a barbershop and a bowling alley, and a beautiful conference center and a speakeasy. So that’s another really fun project, and that’s just launching now that the scaffolding is off. So that’s another one I really enjoyed working on.

We’re in design for the old B. Altman & Company department store at 355 Fifth Avenue. Our client took an office condo piece of it. I think it’s 160,000 square feet. It’s got the columns and all. It was the Oxford University Press offices originally. It’s this beautiful old building, and we’re doing a beautiful old staircase there, which we’re preserving. We’re also doing a really nice bar lounge and library.

With tech leasing on the rise, it seems like a lot of AI tenants are taking more space than they actually need. How do you approach designing spaces for companies that aren’t actually using the entire space?

There’s various ways to approach it.

We’re doing one on Madison Avenue for a financial services tenant. They’re taking maybe 5,000 to 8,000 square feet of extra space, maybe even a little more, and they’re subleasing out to somebody who wants a three-year lease. They’re doing it, and then they’re taking one space, and they’re just using it as a lounge or a rec room, and just not furnishing it and kind of keeping it as break space. So one strategy is sublease.

One other strategy is to shelve it: Let me just hold off and not spend the $250 a square foot, and just shelve it.

Another is to sort of distribute the extra space throughout the space. So instead of 12 rows of training desks in the center, you have a collaborative lounge. We did that for a financial services tenant on lower Broadway, where we created these pocket parks of space that were used for loose furniture, but it was completely pre-provisioned for power. There’s this idea of adaptability, and leaving spaces to breathe throughout the space that can be infilled for density, if you need it.

Ten years from now, what do you think we’ll be talking about when it comes to office space?

I think we’ll be looking at the relationship of AI to space.

In the 1980s, word processing went away and you got computers everywhere and all these huge groups of word-processing people that work 24/7 in downtown. Then we all got iPhones, now you can work all the time. That made us mobile. Not that long ago, we were tethered to a phone line and we were tethered to a big, boxy terminal. If you look back 10 years, I still think most of us had phones on our desk.

And, so, I think the question 10 years from now will be, “What will I do to physical space that will continue to de-tether us?” Because the more you’re mobile, the more space changes. The relationship between technology, mobility and physical space I find fascinating, because I think those have been the big influencers. 

Mobility has created a whole business in coworking. So I think that’s one thing that’ll arrive faster than we probably all think. I’m not trying to say that, “Oh, I think it will diminish the workforce population.” I can’t predict that. But I think that’s an interesting thing that we’re talking about now, and that we will definitely see physical repercussions from, physical outcomes.

I also do believe in mental health and wellness, and what it means to really have a healthy work environment, like with mothers rooms and wellness rooms. I think that’s something that a lot of people talk about.

And then I think the last thing is, because workplace has taken so much from hospitality, this idea of what hospitality really means in the workplace. I think that we’re at this emerging point where it’s an accepted trend, but how does it move forward and operationalize in a better, stronger way? Because it’s basically 30 percent of today’s office developments: the restaurants, hotels and fitness. Getting our arms around that is another major trend that will just continue.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.