Studio Office Interior

Key Facts

Key Facilities

Operations room with display wall and glazed roof, Lounge, Prayer room, Pantry, Washrooms with ablution area, Walled courtyard with pergolas and fire pits

About the Project

Studio Office Interior is an administrative interior planned around a walled courtyard. The work itself happens in a single operations room lit from above through a glazed roof and faced by a full-width display wall; everything else — the lounge, the prayer room, the pantry, the washrooms — is reached from the courtyard rather than from a corridor. The existing brick boundary is left as found and becomes the courtyard wall, with pergolas, fire pits and planting set against it. Inside, the palette is deliberately short: walnut panelling, warm grey stone, pale marble, and concealed light run in coves rather than fittings on show.

The Challenge

The brief covers a set of rooms with very little in common — a room for two dozen people working at screens, a room for prayer, a lounge where visitors wait, a pantry, and washrooms. Run off a corridor, that mix reads as an office with facilities bolted to it, and the rooms that are not work end up as leftover space at the end of a plan.

Our Approach

The courtyard is made the organising room rather than an amenity. Every space fronts onto it, which gives each one an outside wall, daylight and its own entrance, and makes the walk between two rooms a walk through the garden. Material does the wayfinding: walnut for the rooms people sit in, stone for the rooms people wash in, and the same concealed light detail in each so the set still reads as one interior. The brickwork already on site is kept rather than covered, so the courtyard has a face the new work does not have to invent.