2014 Australian Interior Design Awards: Workplace Design

Workplace Design Award Ansarada Office by Those Architects and End of Work 2014 Australian Interior Design Awards

Jury comment

This historic woolstore has been gracefully defined and personalized through a network of interventions, creating the Ansarada Office – a distinct workplace for a virtual data company. The client’s large technical service requirements have been strategically integrated within “floating” floor and ceiling plains ensuring a lightness, openness and legibility to the workspaces and formal meeting zones. The balance of the interior spaces (including reception, informal meeting and breakout areas), creates an important middle ground between the formal work zones and historic brickwork perimeter and structure. Bespoke joinery pieces and a sensitive selection of soft furnishings and artworks, in natural tones and hues, have contributed to making this a warm, enjoyable and refined work environment.

Design statement

The client required a large workspace, informal meeting rooms, a boardroom, a video conference facility, desks for more than fifty staff, a gym, and informal eating, entertaining and reception areas. The architecture of this project is designed to be authentic, transparent, open, flexible and non-invasive. The elements are arranged to clearly define the junction between the interventions and existing fabric, creating an open, honest and transparent space, literally and metaphrically. It is an exceptionally long, large space, one that is difficult to respond to at the human scale. Rather than being dissected into little boxes like traditional offices, the floor plate has been zoned. The design ensures the zones retain a dialogue with each other and work within the existing heritage fabric in a legible way. For example, everywhere the existing floor is exposed, the existing ceiling above is exposed, making it clear where an intervention has been made. The biggest challenge was to ensure the client’s technological requirements were met, while presenting a clean and legible design within the existing heritage fabric.

The award for Workplace Design is supported by Laminex. The Australian Interior Design Awards are presented by the Design Institute of Australia, DesignEX and Artichoke magazine. For more images of this project, see the Australian Interior Design Awards gallery.

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