Lounge, soft seating and the settings in between. How Commercial Office Interiors (COI) uses Hightower on open-line projects across New Hampshire and Greater Boston, and which brands it is bid against on the same brief.
Hightower is an ancillary specialist. It does not make workstations or filing; it makes the lounge, the cafe, the touchdown settings and the acoustic nooks that a hybrid floor now needs more of. Much of the line is designed with Scandinavian and European studios and built for contract use, so it brings a hospitality look with a commercial warranty, a cleanable fabric program and lead times that hold.
COI specifies Hightower when the brief says the office has to compete with working from home. Assigned desks are shrinking as a share of the floor and the settings around them are growing, and most systems manufacturers treat that territory as an afterthought. Hightower treats it as the whole business. A reception, a lounge and a cafe can come from one order with one finish story instead of being assembled from three catalogs.
Pricing sits at the professional to premium tier, and COI bids it against the ancillary ranges from OFS, National and the lounge lines of the systems brands so that the design premium is visible. On a higher-education commons or a client-facing lobby it usually earns it. On a back-of-house break room it usually does not, and a mid-market lounge line is the better spend.
Hightower's acoustic and privacy pieces, high-back sofas, enclosed booths and screens, are the pragmatic reason it appears on COI's open-plan projects. They solve the noise problem a desk floor creates without building walls, and they move when the plan changes. Every piece goes into the RESEAT inventory at install so it can be reused or resold on Day 2.
Same specification, several manufacturers, one line-itemed proposal. The brief decides.
COI carries the project, not one manufacturer. Every workstation, private-office and task-chair typical goes to several brands and comes back on one proposal with prices, lead times, warranties and finishes side by side. Across five New England projects in 2026 the gap between a single-brand bid and the COI open-line bid on the same scope averaged 32 percent.
2D layout and 3D render of every room before anything is ordered. No charge.
Hightower next to its alternatives, with the lead time for each configuration.
Every piece recorded at install so it can be moved, repaired or resold through RESEAT.
COI is an open-line dealer and specifies from 100+ manufacturers. Authorization, territory, warranty routing and the quotation path are confirmed in writing for the exact brand and product on each project, and nothing on these pages should be read as a standing authorization claim for a given line. COI is the Artopex dealer for New Hampshire and one of 10 RESEAT dealers in the U.S.
By bidding the same specification across several of them. A workstation typical, a private-office typical and a task-chair standard each go out to three or more manufacturers, and the proposal shows the prices, lead times, warranties and finishes side by side. The brief decides, not a dealer contract.
Yes, and most COI projects do. A typical floor pairs one manufacturer for workstations, another for private offices, a third for task seating and a fourth for the lounge, each chosen on merit for that room type. COI coordinates the finish palette, the schedule and the installation so the floor reads as one project.
Those brands sell through contracted major-line dealers, so COI does not carry them. When a client has a quote from one of them, COI prices an equivalent open-line specification against it line by line. Across five New England projects in 2026 the average gap was 32 percent on the same scope.