A Closer Look: Alissa Nelson

Interior designer, R&R Realty Group

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It’s a safe bet that Alissa Nelson is one of the few interior designers who has viewed her handiwork from the ground level up to 20,000 feet or so. For the last four years, she has led the interior design department at R&R Realty Group, the commercial real estate development, management, construction and brokerage firm that keeps bringing firsts to the market, such as the first speculative office building built in Greater Des Moines since the Great Recession. Sure, R&R will move its headquarters to the building, but when the handsome, steel and glass structure was announced, the project came with no tenants in tow. That’s a huge order. Another first is that R&R Realty appears to be the only local commercial real estate firm that offers its own interior design department. Nelson leads the department and that means she is responsible for many of the amenities such as mother’s rooms, a food court, rooftop patio, wellness center, even a Starbucks kiosk. The Westfield complex will make a statement and you can bet Nelson will be dotting the “I’s” and crossing the “Ts.” Nelson and crew offer their services to any of the tenants of R&R Realty’s 7 million square feet of commercial space who ask for them. And as for the view, at one point in her career Nelson was designing the interiors of corporate and personal jets for Cessna Aircraft Co. in Wichita, Kan. She also has worked for ITA Group and Allers Associates Architects PC.

Why does R&R Realty have an interior design department?
They were outsourcing the interior design. I think R&R really saw the value in keeping this in house because we can really focus on our clients. We aren’t worried about other clients jumping ahead of ours (when another firm is involved). I can work with my vendors to make sure that we’re getting the best products for the best price point just based on the amount of volume that we can turn around. I only work with clients who are looking at going into an R&R space and we are a completely complementary amenity to them. So no matter how large or small, we’re happy to meet with a client. If it’s someone who is a quick and easy turnaround where we’re not changing walls and doing design work, we have our standard catalog that they can check out that has some nice finished selections and trends that they can choose from or at least use as a good starting place to see what their space is to look like. We’re part of the package.

And now you’re part of the package for the Westfield office building in West Des Moines. That is a signature project for the company. Feeling any pressure?
Westfield is a little bit of a two-part project for our company. As the owner, we are building out all of the common spaces and amenities, so I’ve been kind of heading up that from an interior design standpoint, and we also have our own headquarters, which will be there. I think I’ve had my hands on this project for two years.

Our owner, Dan Rupprecht, had a vision. We hired an outside architecture firm, SVPA, to determine the footprint and what the building would look like. From there, my team was brought in to help solidify where we wanted the amenities spaces. What types of amenities do we want to include within this building to set it apart from others? And then really my part of it was how are these spaces going to function and look and what’s the user experience within the building.

How did you determine what you wanted?
Well, there were a lot of conversations with our marketing team that went out and did the research. I am heavily involved in organizations as well to keep a pulse on what’s happening in the industry of commercial real estate, what’s happening in interior design, what are people asking for. It was a lot of research on a lot of facets.

The benefit of being in house we have those good relationships; knowledge sharing is so easy. It happens in hallways, we set up meetings to discuss things.

More and more research is being conducted as far as what helps make people more productive or maintains wellness within a workplace, and emotional happiness. These are all things that play into how happy people are at their place of work, how engaged they are, which also translates to how much productivity they’re able to do. I mean these are studies and experiments that have been done and conducted and been proven and design is going this way for a reason. We are constantly striving to make a healthier, happier workplace.

Were there any of the current trends that that you just didn’t see working? Was there anything that just didn’t make sense for R&R Realty?
Absolutely. Activity-based working is the future of where we’re seeing the offices going. It’s not right for every company. It’s not right for every culture. For Westfield, we decided to take bits and pieces of that that fit into our culture. So everyone does still have an assigned task in lieu of it just being in a large open area. However, we did spend a lot of time and energy researching — OK, what additional spaces do we need to help people do their jobs? So we’re including things such as focus rooms, where people have an area where they can go and shut the door and do some heads-down work, as well as a lot of different types of collaboration areas with different audio visual technology so it can fit to whatever their needs might be. Culture plays a lot into it. We are a 30-plus-year company.

Early on, we threw away the activity-based working or the free-range officing. We felt like that was way too much of a cultural shift for our company. We still wanted to maintain what made R&R R&R and not do a complete cultural makeover.

Are you going to take any of the dark wood from this office to the new office?
We are going to have some dark wood going across the street. I think every product can be beautiful in the correct application. I get so irritated when I get asked, “Can you make us look like Google?” But you’re not Google. 

Make the connection between designing jets and what you’re doing now.
A big part of what being an interior designer is, is helping people visualize what your result is going to be. Theoretically, all we’re doing is listening to their wants, needs and goals, taking that and translating it into a space, whether it’s a, you know, 26-foot-long aircraft, or it’s a 25,000-square-foot office, it’s really just breaking down what you need and how you need it to function.

Sometimes, we would have also corporate clients come in. So branding was the big piece of it as well with corporate jets. And that’s also a huge part of offices. When you have a client or someone come into your office, you’re really trying to showcase your company and your brand.