When The Beach Company, a 75-year-old real estate development firm in Charleston, South Carolina, decided to relocate and modernize its headquarters, a brand new downtown mixed-use building called The Jasper presented the ideal location. The highly-visible Charleston business conducts a lot of meetings, partner visits, and virtual collaborations, so they contracted local technology integrator experts The Office People to design and install a network of cutting-edge LG commercial displays that help ensure flawless virtual collaboration with plug-and-play simplicity, bring your own device (BYOD) convenience and future-readiness.
Designing for the Future
Even before global corporate culture shifted to remote work in early 2020, The Beach Company had determined that its new HQ would leverage the latest commercial AV technologies to improve communications, support modern collaboration, and present a forward-thinking atmosphere to visitors and staff. After working with The Office People to plan each room’s specific technology needs, it became clear that LG Electronics was the only display manufacturer that could deliver the entire range of class-leading solutions required. They included a 130-inch, all-in-one direct-view LED (DVLED) display, a 98-inch 4K LCD display, a 3×3 paneled LCD video wall composed of nine 55-inch 4K screens, multiple 65-inch conference room displays and a 65-inch OLED wallpaper display that is a mere 3.85mm thick.
According to Jeff Hazelwood, The Beach Company’s Manager of Technology and Information Security, the finished space makes an important state-of-the-art statement to visitors, presenting a vision that matches the city’s beauty. Sitting roughly one block from the Ashley River and occupying the fifth and sixth floors, the office’s largest digital display is actually so vibrant and bright that it is clearly visible from boats passing by.
“We designed our AV experience at The Jasper with several goals in mind,” Hazelwood said. “It needed to be easy to use, with a familiar user experience from room to room, in addition to being future-proof. Plus, we really went for the ‘wow’ factor. Thanks to the experts at The Office People, we have created a display on the inside that is as equally stunning as the views of beautiful Charleston just outside our windows.”
Outshine the Sun
With the building sitting about a block from the Ashley River and the office occupying the fifth and sixth floors, The Beach Company’s largest digital display is actually so vibrant and bright that it is clearly visible from boats passing by.
“The Jasper is one of the largest buildings in Charleston, and The Beach Company is very well known, so this is a landmark of sorts for the city,” said Sean Mummert, CEO of The Office People. “If you’re in the harbor, you can actually see the 130-inch all-in-one DVLED display from a boat, and we know that because people have commented to Jeff [Hazelwood] about it. We see DVLED as the only technology that can reliably overpower the full sunlight this room receives throughout the day, and still perform flawlessly for decades.”
All-in-one DVLED displays from LG Business Solutions are rated for a lifespan of 100,000 hours at full brightness, which equals more than 11 years running 24 hours a day. As one of LG’s new All-in-one models, the display arrived fully assembled, calibrated and ready to plug in and use with virtually no setup.
Double-Duty Displays
Mummert explained that each conference and meeting room in the HQ building is named for a past development project, and any time the displays aren’t being used, they function as digital signage and run content highlighting that project. While the majority of the meeting rooms host a 65-inch 4K display, the 130-inch DVLED and the 3×3 video wall present much larger digital canvases. These oversized displays have proven excellent tools to enable social distancing, with both rooms sometimes being used to include more people in a single meeting.
The system’s full design offers major benefits, as every digital display is connected through an AV over IP solution with a Barco wireless collaboration system that enables network-wide content distribution and automated digital signage functions. The system design also enables a true plug-and-play BYOD atmosphere, so no matter who is running a meeting, what brand their personal devices are or what collaboration platform they use, they can connect simply and quickly in any room without instruction or assistance.
Dressed To Impress
First impressions matter, and that certainly applies to an office’s aesthetic and technological fortitude. “Each display in The Beach Company’s new headquarters is stunning in its own right, but it’s very hard to imagine a visitor today who won’t be blown away by the LG OLED wallpaper in the CEO’s office,” Mummert added.
“LG calls it ‘wallpaper’ because that’s really the best way to describe it; at less than 4mm thick, it basically becomes one with the wall. When you’re hosting other CEOs and business leaders, that is a statement of professionalism and forward thinking that a basic TV from a big box store could never provide.”
The Office People’s Director of Technology Joshua Gale also noted that the space is saturated with digital screens, providing the company an excellent messaging platform for any internal communications they may have.
“There is virtually no space in the new HQ that lacks a top-quality digital display, making the digital signage application a crucial tool to maximize the network’s value and share news and updates with employees,” Gale said.
In addition to the displays, The Office People also installed new high-end pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras, microphones, speakers, tabletop tablets and a room scheduling/ reservation system that uses the 365 Outlook platform.
