Creating A Green Office

Emerald Coast thrives in Thousand Oaks
By Stevi Costa
3/16/07

Improving the quality of your workplace for both customers and employees may be as simple as adding a few plants to your office.

But don’t worry if you don’t have a green thumb; interior landscaping companies can take care of all plant-related matters for you.

As proof of the popularity of plants at work, the five-year-old Thousand Oaks-based interior planting company Emerald Coast Plantscapes has made a name for itself through good design and client referrals. Emerald Coast owner and designer Kevin Urquhart and his team have created the interior plants for the Oxnard headquarters of Sysco Food Services of Ventura, Wachovia Securities of Westlake Village and Saxon Surgical Center of Thousand Oaks, among others.

“From a business perspective, buildings and offices that use plants are perceived to have a more prestigious feel to them,” Urquhart said. “But it also creates a general well-being for the employees and people who visit the building.”

Recent studies by both Rentokil Initial, the parent company of Riverwoods, Ill.-based Initial Tropical Plants, have proven that plants in the workplace have a number of benefits for the workplace, including the creation of better acoustics by diffracting background noise, increasing relative humidity for comfort, and purifying the air—all of which lead to reduced absenteeism among employees.

“There are a lot of things that people don’t realize that plants do for business,” said Todd Ferguson, regional vice president of Initial Tropical Plants for the Los Angeles offices, which services the counties of San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles.

Initial Tropical Plants is responsible for the interior landscapes of Calabasas-based Cheesecake Factory and each of its restaurants throughout the United States. Ferguson and his team also designed and maintain the interior plants at Ventura’s Pacific View Mall.

In addition to creating a more pleasant environment for workers in the building, using plants in restaurants and shopping malls encourages shoppers to stay longer and spend more time and money in the facility, Ferguson said.

Another way in which Initial Tropical Plants creates pleasant environments is through Microfesh ambient scenting. Microfesh can be filtered through a building’s air system so that the pleasant smell will create an ambiance throughout the building. The technology is used in a number of department stores, such as Nordstrom’s, and in many Las Vegas casinos. For example, “MicroFresh technology scents the entire New York, New York hotel to smell like a green apple,” Ferguson said.

In addition to his young “plantscaping” business, Emerald Coast owner Urquhart has 20 years of experience in interior design. Emerald Coast Plantscapes works hand-in-hand with local interior designers who are looking for decorative plants and containers to match the feel of the room they’re creating.

“I have a background in horticulture and interior design,” he said. “Interior designers trust me to create the right look.”

Emerald Coast Plantscapes is not a nursery open to the public, although design clients can sometimes visit Emerald’s headquarters and choose plant accessories from stock on-hand when faced with tight deadlines.

The company uses live specimen-grade plants that are grown in Hawaii and Florida, imported to California and acclimated in greenhouses for indoor-use.

Emerald Coast also specializes in utilizing interior plants to enhance real estate transactions.

“Plants increase the marketability of a building for leasing or for sale,” Urquhart said. Apartment complexes, model homes and commercial retail spaces utilize interior plants to make the rental and leasing spaces more marketable to tenants, and also help in retaining tenants.

Both Emerald Coast Plantscapes and Initial Tropical Plants provide routine maintenance with their interior plant installations and will replace plants that do not thrive. Both companies are supporters of Plants at Work, a national information campaign that works with the interior landscaping industry to promote the benefits of plants in the workplace.

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