This project was a fit out for an international company who occupied standard, cellular accommodation in a business park and were moving to new offices following amalgamation with another company. Due to a delay in agreeing heads of terms they had lost their preferred suite within their chosen building and were left with ground floor accommodation split in 2 by a large atrium.
Our brief was to provide a strategy to unite the 2 parts and provide an open plan solution to encourage staff to interact with each other but retain the individuality of different teams.
The building had been designed to allow multiple sub-divisions, with all windows facing the atrium extending to ground level. In practical terms, this prevented the installation of desks against most of the walls as well as the inability to run continuous services.
The scheme accentuates the separate units as positive features, split into the “working” side and the “display” side. This allows visitors/customers to be taken to the ‘display’ side, where the emphasis is on displaying the company, and staff to operate mainly from the “working side”, with an emphasis on them rather than customers.
The ‘display’ side is as open as possible with largely glass partitions and a curved wall showing physical examples of the company products. The ‘working side’ has all desks set within the body of the room under ‘blades’ formed in the ceiling. These differentiate different teams and are designed to allow services to be dropped to each cluster of desks. The ‘blade’ is based on the company logo of a gas turbine.
