SRK, The Hague, Holland – Interior Design, Product Design
Brief: SRK a leading Law Firm in the Hague asked us to transform their grey, closed office into a colorful interactive and more communal working environment.
Design: Working closely with the whole team at SRK, from board members to secretaries, we used our interactive design decision tool to engage and involve the client from the very first meeting. This enabled them to define a unified vision for the project, which we then expressed through tailored mood boards.
A bold colour palette was developed, transforming the dark 1970s concrete office building encased in tinted glass with an injection of light and colour. Our first priority was to create ample space for interaction whether in meetings, presentations, at lunch or just around the office. The 1st Floor became the Living Room of the organization with ample space for interaction with two auditoriums, a library, bar, smoking room and dining area with four seating options; large dining tables, circular booths bar seating and smaller benches. The Ground Floor we assigned to formal meeting space with clients of the firm.
Throughout the office as a whole we created two distinct worlds; a collective space and individual work places. The ground floor was assigned as formal collective space and the first floor as informal communal space for internal usage. The remaining upper floors combine both collective and individual space creating a variety of work typologies. Every department on these upper floors had a communal space with visual reference to the 1st floor comprising a coffee area and informal seating, specially designed mail house, photocopying machines, kitchen and an informal meeting room or project space. This created small communal hubs within the individual work spaces and abolished the post and coffee being brought individually and sandwiches at desks, encouraging interaction and knowledge transfer between staff.
Flowers were the central visual motif within the interior, used as a theme to create coherence between floors and the individual and communal spaces. Within the office difficult situations and tense negotiations take place every day. Flowers provide the perfect neutral backdrop for the staff and their clients to work. We designed and developed bespoke felt tapestries, Dutch Flowers, with hand drawn designs in the vibrant colours of our SRK palette; baby pink, lime green, steel blue, poppy red and warm grey. A rose motif was used in the formal meeting rooms creating warm blasts of colour combined with the soft texture of the wool, and poppies were used in the communal spaces and the board room.
Within individual working spaces the colour palette was used more sparingly against monochrome white, black and greys. Each employee chose his or her own reading lamp, each in a different variation of the rose design making reference to the tapestries in the ground floor meeting rooms and adding colour to their work places. Within the communal spaces the specially designed ‘mail house’ added a playful block of solid colour along with bright chairs and pendant lamps also bearing the rose motif.
For this project we required a large table that could fulfill a number of functions; canteen table, meeting table, desk, coffee table, all in a variety of lengths. We set to work and designed our Last Supper Table, the seminal piece from our furniture firm Studio Lawrence. Based on the Fibonacci sequence, the tabletop composition comprises a lined sequence in the bold colours of the palette. Each table could use any combination of colours and could work as a desk or meeting table at its standard length and could extend to double, triple even quadruple its length to form a boardroom table and the canteen tables.
The lined sequences even worked along the floors as well as on the tables, on the ground floor the sequences start right from the parking spaces, continuing into the reception and right to the thresholds of the formal meeting rooms. The logical lined sequences complemented the flowing lines of the flower motifs and created a coherent look throughout the whole office; a light, bright, colourful and friendly place to work.
