Heritage & Future of Work

When ancient stones recruit tomorrow

For HelloWork, we unveiled 900m² of historic Bordeaux spaces into a campus where 50 talents reinvent employment beneath heritage vaults.

900 m²
3 months
2023

heritage_revisite

Concept

When the future of work is written within a listed building

HelloWork is a French platform dedicated to employment, recruitment and training. The 2023 project delivered 900 sq m of offices in Bordeaux within a listed building, in three months, for 50 employees: the challenge of blending heritage with modernity.

Situation

HelloWork, a French platform dedicated to employment, recruitment and training, entrusted Kytom with the delivery of 900 sqm of offices in Bordeaux within a heritage building. The project, delivered in 2023 within three months, was to accommodate 50 employees without touching the protected stone vaults, plaster mouldings and period parquet.

The chosen ratio, 18 sqm per workstation, contradicts the usual densification of tertiary floors: HelloWork’s training and coaching activities produce value through synchronous in-person delivery, and therefore require acoustic volume per head. In a tight tech recruitment market in Bordeaux, the extra sqm per workstation becomes a quantifiable sourcing argument, not an operating cost to be squeezed.

Three months, heritage building, business as usual: three simultaneous constraints

The challenge lay not in the surface area but in the simultaneity. Heritage protection prohibited any structural work: stone vaults retained, plaster mouldings preserved, supply ducts to be realigned within the existing grids without through-drilling. The works window, aligned with HelloWork’s HR recruitment cycle, was capped at three months with no margin.

The high volumes and hard surfaces (parquet, stone, plaster) generated a reverberation time measured at 1.2 seconds in the pilot room, incompatible with a teaching activity where speech intelligibility is the deliverable. Added to this was disabled access (PMR) to be reworked within an old envelope where each opening had to be negotiated with the ABF, and an activity partially maintained during the final weeks.

Two structuring decisions: technical skirtings and reversible full-height partitions

Heritage orthodoxy would have led to minimising contemporary additions and cabling within the false ceiling. The chosen approach was the opposite: to embrace the additions as a legible and fully removable layer, so that nothing is fixed into the heritage fabric. First decision: category 6A IT cabling housed in fitted technical skirtings, never in the moulded walls nor in the vaults.

No chasing, removal possible in 48 hours without a trace. Second decision: full-height demountable partitions with acoustic glazing, surface-mounted without any structural connection to the original plaster, with a DnTA target measured in the pilot room.

The rest of the intervention follows from these two choices: high-density carpet tiles in dialogue with the retained parquet, DALI lighting from 3000 K to 4000 K depending on use, ventilation ducts realigned within the existing grids.

Kytom managed the 14 work packages as design and build under a single project management, sequenced by zone rather than by trade, which made it possible to handle the partially occupied site over the final six weeks with a weekly client review and an updated 3D synthesis.

900 sqm delivered in three months, reverberation brought down from 1.2 to 0.8 seconds

The project met its three-month milestone, aligned with the HR recruitment cycle, and delivered 50 operational workstations across 900 sqm. The reverberation time of the pilot room dropped from 1.2 to under 0.8 seconds after treatment, compliant with the NF S 31-080 standard for meeting and training spaces.

The logic of reversibility embraced in the design extends to the materials assessment: the installed furniture shows 95% reuse potential, 90% recyclability, 90% repairability and 30% already-recycled components. The same decision (to fix nothing into the fabric) that protected the heritage at the outset now protects the residual value of the fit-out at the end of the lease.

The design was rated 4 out of 5 on Kytom’s internal radar. For HelloWork’s HR Director, these 900 sqm operate as a sourcing asset in a Bordeaux market where the tech candidate visits before signing.

900

sq m transformed

months of work

workstations

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