How Amenities Are Evolving Through COVID-19
How has COVID-19 altered conventional living?
Modern living has been redefined since the advent of COVID-19. Children are attending school virtually, with their parents within earshot, tuned into a work conference call. Conventional recreation and social activities became restricted and we’ve had to pick up new pastimes while being forced indoors.
As people shelter in place, amenities play a bigger role than ever before, providing convenience, comfort, and recreation.
3 Key Implications Underlying Changes to Amenities
Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, 5 million employees in the US alone were already working from home. Current government-imposed restrictions for both public and private sectors have increased these figures exponentially, given the global scale of migration to working from home arrangements.
As work and play shifts to the home, this has three important implications in transforming amenities within properties. These are:
Increased hygiene measures in shared spaces,
Enabling work and social activities to take place at home, and
Minimizing risk of exposure to COVID-19 from beyond the premises.
Increasing hygiene measures within shared spaces
An array of measures have been introduced to reduce the risk of transmission within communal areas. These revolve around minimizing physical contact or altogether replacing it with touch-free appliances that are frequently accessed by residents in a multi-family property.
Examples of this include automatic appliances such as motion-triggered faucets, bins, toilets, and doors fitted with keycard access. Where prevention of physical contact is difficult, automatic sanitizer dispensers, disinfectant wipes, face masks, and gloves are made available. Additionally, areas that are commonly accessed in buildings such as function rooms, public toilets and elevators are disinfected regularly and only permit a fixed number of users at any given time.
Enabling work and social activities to take place at home
The shift of social and work activities to the home has also required infrastructural changes to support the transition. A stable and fast internet connection with sufficient bandwidth is needed to support an entire building’s worth of users and the occasional spikes in use. (No one likes to be disconnected from an important work call!)
In common areas such as co-working lounges, soundproof rooms or pods are set up to enable residents to participate in calls without interrupting or being interrupted. Furniture that is easily disassembled and reassembled to cater to social distancing norms have also become popular so the number of users a space can accommodate at a time can be scaled up or down easily.
Recreational amenities such as fitness centers have also seen their share of changes. Workout stations and machines have been spaced out to observe social distancing rules. To accommodate the needs of residents, certain gyms are open around-the-clock to compensate for only permitting a limited number of users at any given time. Apps such as URBN Playground allow property management to allocate and reserve time slots, confirm absence of symptoms, track and log the use of residents in amenities in a building.
Minimizing risk of exposure to COVID-19 from beyond the premises
New amenities have also been introduced to ensure that the pandemic does not find its way into homes from the outside. New apps have popped up that only permit authorized personnel such as food and delivery services to enter the premises, subject to health screening at the point of entry. A rise in online shopping has led to the development of mailroom management systems with locker apps that ensure packages are delivered to residents securely, giving residents the option of permitting building entry without having to leave the confines of their unit.
What does this mean?
This transformation in amenities triggered by the pandemic is likely to continue into the future, offering flexibility, safety, and convenience to residents.
For building developers and designers working on ongoing projects, important questions will need to be answered: Will social distancing and new hygienic practices become the new norm? Should floor plans, layouts, and lifestyle programming within a building take into account and cater to long-term social distancing, or should you plan for flexibility and ease of scaling up and down operations as needed? Will you focus on providing more square footage to accommodate socially-distanced amenities or will you favor spaces that can be multipurpose or compartmentalized? How will technology be implemented to ensure safety, hygiene, and convenience?
The answers to these considerations are nuanced, and require careful consideration. While social distancing presents constraints and challenges, it’s also an opportunity for creativity and re-imagining spaces and amenities of the future.