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      Kingston Lafferty Design incorporates wellness spaces into Belfast co-working office

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      Dublin interiors firm Kingston Lafferty Design has incorporated green walls, a yoga studio and rooftop terrace across the eight floors of this co-working office in the centre of Belfast, Northern Ireland.Commissioned by property developer Magell, Kingston Lafferty Design (KLD) was asked to create warm and welcoming interiors for the 2,787-square-metre office — called Urban HQ — which breaks the traditional office mould.

      Above: a custom pendant is suspended in the walnut-clad boardroom. Top image: green walls feature throughout the office
      Informed by how the boundaries between work and leisure have become increasingly blurred in the past decade, the firm said it wanted the complex to provide workers and visitors with relaxed and informal spaces as well as areas for focused work.
      In addition to the more traditional private working booths, open offices and meeting rooms, Urban HQ also features dedicated wellness and focus rooms, co-working areas, coffee docks and a central lounge and event space that employees can move freely between.

      Curtains help to separate spaces

      “Psychologically, it is beneficial to have a completely different environment to escape to from the desk,” KLD founder Róisín Lafferty told Dezeen.
      “For us it was about the details, creating interesting nooks and crannies throughout that provide that varied experience and cater to people’s unique behaviours throughout the day.”

      TP Bennett retrofits 1970s office building with Manchester’s largest living wall

      “We wanted to create spaces that are as warm and welcoming to one person working alone as they are for large groups of people working together,” she added.

      A collaborative space can be closed off from the main kitchen with partitions
      To support this relaxed atmosphere, the firm selected a palette of inviting, homely materials — such as stone, leather, slatted wood, velvet and brass — that vary throughout the building to give each area a distinctive feel.
      The ground floor, for example, is designed to be an adaptable space that can accommodate a variety of different activities from collaborating to socialising.

      A timber walkway guides guests to the reception desk
      To provide a visual distinction between these functions, KLD used different flooring finishes and lighting as well as subtle variations in colour tones.
      Visitors to the building are welcomed into a double-height lobby space clad in timber and anchored by a custom floating light installation. From here, a set of doors leads to the ground floor reception area, where a timber walkway guides them to a cube-shaped mirror and stainless-steel desk that appears to levitate above the blue marble floor.

      The desk is clad in mirror and stainless-steel
      Another set of double glass doors leads guests through into the canteen, which Lafferty describes as the “main hub” of the building. Resembling an open kitchen in a restaurant, it features a central bar made from mirrored brass and terrazzo surrounded by upholstered bench seating.
      “The ground floor is where the energy is in the building,” Lafferty said. “It is the place where all the different people can mix and mingle, chill out, catch up and socialise. The layout plays a big part in this. One of the key things I wanted to do from the start was create a central hub that draws people in.”

      The canteen space is anchored by a central bar made from mirrored brass and terrazzo
      Other ground floor spaces include a walnut-clad boardroom and a series of collaborative and social spaces. Green walls, ceilings and planters are integrated throughout.
      “Psychologically, the link to nature enhances the feeling of tranquillity,” Lafferty explained. “It is also proven to stimulate productivity and positive thinking.”

      Booths line the walls around the central bar
      The upper floors are accessed through secret doors concealed within the entrance lobby, leading to the stairwell, lifts and additional toilets.
      Each floor offers a range of different kinds of offices – from small, two-person set-ups to full-floor office expanses with their own reception.
      Each floor also has a series of spacious meeting rooms, meeting pods, four-person meeting and lunch booths, and colourful kitchen spaces designed to contrast with the surrounding offices.

      One large wellness room is located on the first floor
      The wellness room is located on the first floor and can be used for yoga classes, meditation and other tech-free activities to help members unwind.
      “The wellness room is a forward-thinking approach to office design as it provides a calming space where members are encouraged to disconnect and recharge away from their desk,” said Lafferty.
      “The design was kept minimal, incorporating tactile finishes through cork flooring and suspended planting combined with a mirror to fill the room with natural light – all proven to contribute to overall workplace wellbeing.”

      The rooftop offers rare views across Belfast
      “One of the biggest treats in the building is located on the top floor,” she added. “The rooftop garden looks out over Belfast city with the historic copper roofs. With ample seating and tables, this is a perfect spot for an after-work drink, a special party or an event. It is rare to get this in Belfast.”
      Elsewhere in the UK, TP Bennett recently retrofitted a 1970s office building in Manchester with the city’s biggest living wall.
      Photography is by Mariell Lind Hansen.

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      Franklin Azzi Architecture completes The Bureau co-working space in Paris

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      French practice Franklin Azzi Architecture took tips from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright to design this Parisian co-working space, which features open areas for working, dining and lounging.The co-working space can be found along Rue du Quatre-Septembre in Paris’ second arrondissement, joining two other branches of The Bureau in the capital’s eighth arrondissement.
      This new location is set inside a Hausmann building that dates back to the 19th century, but when it came to devising the interiors, Franklin Azzi Architecture had a more modern point of reference – mid-century homes created by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

      Top image: The Bureau’s restaurant. Above: one of the building’s communal work areas

      “Those houses are manifestos because Frank Lloyd Wright broke free from unnecessary partitions to reveal open areas largely bathed in light, which was very innovative for the beginning of the 20th century,” the practice’s eponymous founder, Franklin Azzi, told Dezeen.
      “For me, they are timeless works that reflect a real desire for integration into their environment through horizontality.”

      An oak partition is inbuilt with private work booths
      In keeping with Llyod Wright’s architecture, The Bureau’s ground level has been made to have a largely open layout.
      The floor plan is interrupted by just one oak-lined partition, which is inbuilt with deep-set bookshelves and private booths where members can escape to take calls or do more focused work.

      The concierge desk can be screened off by heavy green curtains
      Adjacently lies an expansive workroom that features a long communal desk. Dangling above is a chandelier composed of glass spheres and silver-metal spokes.
      Towards the front of the room is a concierge desk, which can be screened off by floor-to-ceiling green curtains if necessary.

      Members will be able to dine at an in-house restaurant called The Comptoir
      The Bureau’s in-house restaurant, called The Comptoir, has been created in a corner of the ground floor. A grey seating banquette winds around the wall, accompanied by brass-edged tables and wooden dining chairs.
      Surrounding surfaces, including the structural columns and part of the ceiling, have been lined with slim mirrored panels.
      Just in front of the restaurant is a striking, 70s-style decor feature – a sunken conversation pit complete with a plush, deep-green sofa and carpeting to match.

      Franklin Azzi Architecture converts Nantes warehouses into art school

      “In terms of inspiration, I position myself as an assembler, picking uninhibitedly from different periods and several registers,” explained Azzi.
      “We immersed ourselves in the 1970s world of American offices, as well as the colours and material codes infused with Oscar Niemeyer’s work to create a unique hybrid identity for The Bureau.”

      A sunken conversation pit lies in front of the restaurant
      The upper levels of the building play host to more private work areas and meeting rooms, which boast original fireplaces and ornate ceiling cornicing.
      Here, as well as downstairs, are a number of furnishings and ornaments sourced by French decorators The Socialite Family.

      Meeting rooms upstairs showcase the building’s original features
      The pandemic may have put co-working on hold for now, but shared offices are still continuing to pop up. Earlier this year, architect Caro Lundin opened the doors to ARC Club in east London, which is specifically designed for those tired of working from home.
      Photography is by Valerio Geraci.

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      ARC Club is a London co-working space for people wanting to escape working from home

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      Architect Caro Lundin took a less-is-more approach for the creation of ARC Club, a fuss-free co-working space in east London for those struggling to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic.It took just six weeks for Lundin and her self-titled studio to complete ARC Club, which takes over a formerly characterless retail unit in the neighbourhood of Homerton.
      The co-working space is meant to cater to the growing number of individuals who, according to surveys observed by Lundin, are finding it tricky to efficiently do their job from home during the pandemic due to lack of proper workspaces.

      Its “starkly beautiful” interiors have been decked out with a selection of low-cost and durable materials that Lundin felt reflected a climate where co-working is “a necessity and not a nice-to-have”.

      Designing a more modest space also meant that membership would be cheaper for those interested in working at ARC Club according to the architect.
      “Intricate details and indoor gardens are fun, but they come with a big price tag – and they’re a lot harder to keep clean,” said Lundin, who founded ARC Club alongside Hannah Philp.

      “When designing ARC Club, I asked myself ‘what do people need to work?’ A comfortable seat, natural light, thoughtful acoustics; the physical and emotional space in which to think,” she told Dezeen.
      “Functional doesn’t have to be boring, it’s a neutral space that enables the people who visit it to be their best professional selves.”

      At the centre of ARC Club, which measures just over 232 square metres, are a pair of boxy, sound-proofed pods crafted from birch plywood.
      Inside, they accommodate a handful of private meeting rooms, storage cupboards, printers and a kitchenette complete with silver-metal cabinetry.
      Lundin chose to house these services inside a pod-style system so that it can be scaled up or down to suit different-sized branches of ARC Club that open in the future.

      The pods are surrounded by various work areas. A few of the furnishings, like the birch-ply tables with the arched legs, were made by Lundin’s studio while some of the chairs were sourced second hand.

      “Offices are going to get much smaller” after pandemic says Sevil Peach

      Pops of colour have been introduced to brighten up the space. Heavy orange curtains are used as room dividers, blue cone-shaped pendant lights have been suspended from the ceiling and bands of yellow paint have been made on the concrete structural columns.
      Yellow tiles also clad surfaces in the bathrooms.

      Further branches of ARC Club co-working spaces are planned to open in 2021.
      Like the Homerton location, they will occupy vacant high-street commercial units in popular residential areas so that members can do what Lundin has monikered “WNH” – work near home.

      “A neighbourhood workplace like ARC Club allows people to retain the best of what the office has to offer – full functionality, work-life separation and human interaction – without having to get on a bus or a train,” Lundin explained.
      “In essence, it’s an accessible flexible option for a new breed of remote worker who has grown used to scheduling their work around their day, instead of the other way.”

      The global coronavirus crisis has forced many to re-think offices and the way in which we work.
      Interior designer Sevil Peach predicts that, post-pandemic, companies will scrap working in corporate towers and instead opt to have central “hubs” where just a small per cent of staff will gather.
      Architecture practice Weston Williamson + Partners also released a series of graphics that illustrated how businesses could create socially-distanced offices. Tips included wrapping screens around desks, having touch-free doors and employing a cook so that employees don’t have to use a shared kitchen.
      Photography is by Andrew Meredith.

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      Cabinette co-working space in Valencia plays off Jacques Tati's film Playtime

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      The 1960s film Playtime by renowned French director Jacques Tati set the tone for this whimsical co-working office that Masquespacio has designed in Valencia.Cabinette is a co-working space for creatives set inside a mixed-use building in Valencia’s La Fuensanta neighbourhood.

      It takes over a ground-floor unit that was originally fit-out to serve as an apartment. Leaving the existing bathroom facilities in place, interiors studio Masquespacio reconfigured the rest of the floor plan to accommodate a series of work areas for Cabinette’s members.

      The studio’s founders, Christophe Penasse and Ana Milena Hernández Palacios, wanted to give the 200-square-metre space a retrofuturist aesthetic that’s attractive to millennials but also makes “a clear wink to the past”.

      A particular point of reference was Playtime – a 1967 comedy film directed by Jaques Tati that follows character Monsieur Hulot as he navigates a gadget-filled version of future Paris.
      It’s revered for its satirical take on modern life and was also included in Dezeen’s list of 10 films with amazing architecture.

      Masquespacio creates colour-clashing interior for phone-repair shop in Valencia

      “We once visited a museum installation here in Valencia where they showcased some fragments of the movie, especially a moment where the leading actor goes to a meeting,” Penasse told Dezeen.

      In the film, when Hulot arrives at the meeting, he enters a huge office where each employee’s desk is closed in by a cabinet-lined box – a feature which inspired Cabinette’s name.
      Penasse and Palacious have similarly divided desks in the co-working space, but instead of individual boxes have erected low-lying partitions.
      As with the interior of the boxes in Playtime, the desks and chairs in Cabinette are a pastel green-blue colour.

      The same colour features across the floor, as well as the counter, tiled splashback and a couple of cupboards in the kitchen, which sits in the corner of the room.
      Walls and part of the floor here are painted chocolate-brown, complementing the steel stools from Masquespacio’s Déjà-Vu collection that appear beside the counter. They each feature tiers of brown, ochre and blue fringing.
      Another wall in Cabinette is clad in mirrored panels, while one on the far side of the office is a bright lilac hue. It’s decorated with various graphic-print canvases and rows of illuminated tube lights.

      A set of stairs leads up to a mezzanine where there are a pair of intimate meeting rooms that members can use for group work or take private phone calls.
      They’re screened off by the same shiny silver curtains that hang in front of the full-height windows at ground level that look through to an outdoor terrace.

      There is also a more formal boardroom that features deep-purple surfaces. The central lacquered-wood table is surrounded by Masquespacio’s gold-framed Arco chairs, which are upholstered in burnt-orange velvet.
      The studio’s eye-shaped Wink lights are also mounted on the wall.

      Masquespacio was established in 2010 by Penasse and Ana Milena Hernández Palacios. The studio has applied its colourful aesthetic to a number of projects.
      These include a phone repair shop that features a clashing mix of salmon-pink and turquoise surfaces, and a tropical green and maroon restaurant that offers Brazilian-Japanese cuisine.
      Photography is by Luis Beltran.

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      Los Angeles church transformed into The Ruby Street co-working and event space

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      Stained glass windows feature alongside contemporary furniture in this multipurpose space in Los Angeles designed by Francesca de la Fuente and Working Holiday Studio. The Ruby Street venue occupies an Arts and Crafts-style building that was constructed in the late 19th century in LA’s Highland Park neighbourhood. The building has a storied past, having served as […] More

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      NeueHouse opens Los Angeles co-working space inside landmarked Bradbury Building

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      Canadian studio DesignAgency incorporated “soft and graceful flourishes” into NeueHouse’s latest co-working location that occupies a full floor in a 1890s structure in Downtown Los Angeles. Founded in 2011, NeueHouse describes itself as a “cultural home for creators, innovators and thought leaders”. The company’s new workspace in Los Angeles joins two other locations in New […] More

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      Berlin's Brutalist Silence co-working space has barely anything inside

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      Concrete surfaces and just a smattering of furnishings provide a “silent stage” for members using this Berlin co-working space, designed by Annabell Kutucu. The co-working space – which interior designer Kutucu named Brutalist Silence – is set inside Marina Marina, a creative hub that sits beside the waters of Berlin’s Spree River. When tasked with developing […] More