Jeff Hannoosh is getting ready to move offices. For five years he's worked at West Elm, the midrange-end-but-not-quite-Ikea furnisher that's come to define today's urban apartment aesthetic. Sales of all that blond wood, Middle Eastern fabric, and affordable marble led to revenue of $670 million for the company in 2014, up from half that in 2012. So 13 years after West Elm opened its first office, it's upgrading to a 150,000-square-foot space built in a revamped Brooklyn warehouse. For a furniture company, the stakes for decorating your workplace are understandably high. Hannoosh was recently promoted to vice president for design, furniture, and lighting, and his current space is brimming with West Elm prototypes that were never put into production by parent company Williams-Sonoma. There's a lacquer bar console packed with books, an unsteady five-headed floor lamp, and a bronze-and-brass wire table that he uses for meetings. But none of it really works as office furniture. When West Elm decided to move, the company spent time looking at industrial furniture catalogs but couldn't find anything they liked. Eventually, "it made sense to us that we wanted to furnish it with our own furniture," Hannoosh says.
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