Why Corporate Interiors is more than a furniture dealership

Don’t let its location fool you: Though it’s tucked away down a quiet road off U.S. 13 in New Castle, the 100,000-square-foot Corporate Interiors building is a hub for design, manufacturing, storage and administration.

Times are good for the furniture dealership: It was recently named a Steelcase Platinum Partner Authorized Dealer, one of 25 in the country, for its community outreach and customer satisfaction.

The company, which has been around for 30 years, specializes in outfitting office spaces — along with hospitals and schools. What sets Corporate Interiors apart is its range of 150 in-house professionals who design, repair and install for a centralized experience, said Pat O’Brian, a company spokesman.

The Corporate Interiors New Castle showroom. (Photo by Lindsay Podraza)

The breadth of the company is a lot to take in: It works with Steelcase as its main supplier but also carries 200 other lines of products. Just like on HGTV shows, designers meet with clients and show 3D renderings of what their workspace could look like. The New Castle building stores many of Corporate Interior’s products, which are searchable by bar code scanners and online client catalogues. The grounds’ manufacturing facility includes enormous computer numerical controlled (CNC) cutting machines that can create shapes, textures and designs in products.

But the company’s not just about ergonomic desk chairs and re-mountable wall panels — cutting-edge technology plays a big role as well. Electronic adjustable standing desks, digitized conference-room schedulers (the screen glows red when the room is in use and shows who’s in the meeting) and subtle yet strategically installed white noise speakers are some of Corporate Interior’s hottest items.

A Steelcase RoomWizard, used for scheduling meetings. (Photo by Lindsay Podraza)

Along with new bells and whistles, O’Brian said the company’s services have evolved with business-place trends: In the ’90s, everyone wanted private offices. Then open floor plans with workstations gained popularity in the mid-2000s. Today, people want a balance between the two, and Corporate Interiors is witnessing the rise of designated meeting spaces and phone rooms.

The company’s also seeing more of the work-share or coworking phenomenon — which O’Brian said has just taken off in the past decade — where professionals from different companies (often startups) work in the same office.

Being local is a key part of the company’s business model so that it can deliver on everything from planning to installation. That doesn’t mean they’re not expanding — while Corporate Interiors serves Delaware and the Philadelphia area, its next big step is involvement with the revitalization of Camden.