“I empower design clients to do their most inspired work.”
– Alexa Bustamante
About Alexa
I’m the Director of Sales and Marketing at Contemporary Office Interiors responsible for co-leading the BC dealership. I see my role as a duty to improve the livelihood of employees at the workplace through co-creating inspiring design environments. My curiosity for researching business models and thinking strategically about workplace projects brought me to this position—not to mention my burning passion for purposeful design.
This passion motivated me to bring a new perspective to my role, and find a way to connect more meaningfully with my network. My role at Contemporary Office Interiors is to help my industry peers succeed and to celebrate their work, and Spaces Uncovered is the platform to do it! Through sharing project success stories, promoting design clients’ brands and exchanging knowledge, I hope to give industry professionals freedom to share intimate, behind-the-scenes stories of their most inspired work. I aspire to create a place for our industry to be vulnerable in sharing their raw, sometimes messy construction process—all while we make authentic connections and build a more inclusive culture.
Project by DIALOG. Photo credit: Brett Hitchens.
Alexa’s epiphany
I was at architecture and design firm DIALOG for almost six years, and the more projects that I completed, the better the storytelling became. But I soon realized that the concept behind the design intent was often forgotten unless I was there to narrate it.
My epiphany occurred while working on the JJ Bean café project at UBC with my team. The on-campus café was designed to both reflect student behaviours and nurture their curiosity. The café’s meandering circulation route mimics a student’s journey through university, with obstacles in the way that inspire intellectual conversation and networking opportunities.
The team and I spent hours designing a meaningful custom light fixture to support this concept (shown at left). People standing at the cash register or seated upstairs at the bar may notice that the fixture extrusions, when aligned, reveal two coded words relevant to the project’s location: ‘UBC’ and “JJB”. This secret message embodied the project’s concept: only those with enough curiosity would discover it. Genius!
Fast forward to construction completion: although the project won awards, no one knew about the secret message. There was no vehicle to communicate our story. My goal is for Spaces Uncovered to become that kind of platform—where stories behind projects live on for the world to experience.