What used to be the reception at the former doctor's surgery is now an area for Dezeen Watch Store customers to come and look at, try and buy timepieces from the curated selection available at our online store.

Watches are caged behind black metal-mesh doors in back-lit plywood storage units, and peg board has been added to hang tools for packing and distributing products including our Dezeen Book of Ideas.

Post-Office founder Philippe Malouin and his team divided the waiting room with a patchwork of reclaimed windows, creating separate meeting and work spaces.

"It made immediate sense to create a wall of glass as a barrier," Malouin told us. "We sourced most of the Victorian windows from eBay, but had to do a lot of research to find windows the right size that could be cut and pasted into the space."

Plants now hang below the skylight in the meeting room and cacti are mounted on the wall.

"The main features in the space that caught our interest were the windows in the roof," said Malouin. "They reminded us of a greenhouse, so we filled the space with live plants."

A red sofa obtained at a local market sits below the cacti and a mix of old and new Stool 60s by Alvar Aalto for Artek stand among more foliage around a traditional Berber rug.

"We wanted to use vintage items to make the space less formal and more homely," he said.

Molded plastic Eames chairs from Vitra and bespoke plywood tables furnish the workspace, along with a display of our heads that were scanned and 3D printed for our print-on-demand publication Print Shift.

Mounted on the walls in both spaces are Malouin's LED lamps that emanate light through shutter-like slats, which he designed as one of last year's W Hotels Designers of the Future award winners.

Outside, the facade has been given a fresh lick of white paint and a relief of our logo has been added above the letterbox.

When Post-Office originally designed the Dezeen office in 2011 they added a gold curtain, which has been replaced by light grey fabric, and kitted-out the space with Malouin's Market Table and Hanger Chairs. An exhibition of new work by Malouin is currently on show at an exhibition in Milan.

Photography above is by Luke Hayes.

Dezeen is based at 100a Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16 0AP - stop by and take a look at our watches.

See more designs by Philippe Malouin »
See more office interior design »

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by Post-Office appeared first on Dezeen.

Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley and operations director Derek Stewart worked with interior designer Audra Canfield of Designer Fluff to develop a concept for the interiors, intended to create a fun and relaxed working environment that matches the style of the website.

The team created a series of meeting rooms, each designed around a different badge. These badges are hung above the entrance to each room to help employees to find their way around.

The Swarm badge, which Foursquare users earn by visiting busy places, is designated to a room with a beehive theme. Tessellated yellow wallpaper lines one wall, while pendant lights resembling beehives are suspended over the conference table and a honeycomb-patterned clock hangs from the wall.

A nightclub-themed room is assigned to the Socialite badge, which users pick up by visiting one of several exclusive venues in New York and San Francisco. This room features flocked wallpaper, a cow-skin rug and a crystal chandelier.

Antique cameras fill the Photogenic room, based on the badge earned for visting photo booths, while the Bookworm badge, for libraries, denotes an area with recycled magazine wallpaper and back-to-front books on its shelves.

The badge given for visits to vegetarian restaurants appears above the door of a meeting room containing a grassy floor and terrariums filled with plants and plastic animals. Meanwhile, the Vinyl room has records covering its walls.

Other spaces in the headquarters include a lounge, where the team have added a pair of phone boxes, a bar and a general office with a simple monochrome colour scheme. "I felt a grey and white backdrop would allow the living colour of the office to speak for itself and also balance the fun and maturity that they desired," says Canfield.

The Foursquare New York offices are the latest in string of playful designs for technology company headquarters. Others completed recently include Google's Tel Aviv offices, which contain oranges trees and slides, and Adobe's Utah campus, where employees can play basketball and ping pong. See more of the offices here, or read a column from Dezeen columnist Sam Jacob calling for an end to the "tyranny of fun" in office design.

Here's a statement from Audra Canfield:

I didn't hesitate when I was asked to help design Foursquare's Soho office in New York City. As a location-based social networking company, Foursquare "helps you and your friends make the most of where you are". I was hired by Derek Stewart, the Director of Finance and Operations, who had already begun designing the office and had set a tone from which to build a concept. The Foursquare team had decided that they wanted each conference room to have a different unique theme based on their check-in badges, i.e. Jetsetter for airport check-ins, Far Far Away for destinations above 59th St bridge in NYC, and Vinyl for record store check-ins. The badges hang outside the door of each conference room creating a repetition of color and shape throughout the space.

Foursquare's office dynamic is comprised of unconventional working areas, lounges, and a recreational room including shuffle board, foosball, and ping pong tables. They wanted some of the conference rooms to have the typical long tables and others to have a more relaxing, sitting room style. With a tight budget and time frame, Derek and I worked together with Foursquare owner Dennis Crowley to create both a fun and functional office space that reflects Foursquare's unique aesthetic. It was important to Dennis that the office be vivacious and hip, but also sophisticated. Most importantly, he wanted it to feel relaxed. Afterall, most of the company's employees are in their 20's and 30's.

For the main office color scheme, we decided to go with grey and white. We brought in touches of the bright blue and yellow with the pillows from my company, Designer Fluff. Around the office you find boldly colored toys, games, books, clothing and so on. I felt a grey and white backdrop would allow the living color of the office to speak for itself and also balance the fun and maturity that they desired.

For Dennis Crowley's favorite conference room, Herbivore, we decided to use custom terrariums from the Brooklyn based company Twig. Each unique terrarium holds one or more small plastic herbivore animals and is arranged on floating reclaimed wood shelves. Black Eames Eiffel Wood chairs are paired with a wood and iron table. House Pet carpet tiles in the Frog color from Flor further reference the room's concept. A greenhouse style pendant suspends over the table.

Socialite, the check-in for nightclubs and bars, was a fun room to create because I could really go glam with it. Although my faux fur purple hide wallpaper didn't make the cut, I was happy with the Flocked Damask and Foil wallcovering Dennis chose. We used a white cowhide rug, a purple velvet lounge chair, a crystal chandelier, and reflective furniture accents.

Photogenic is the badge for places with photobooths. For this room, I hung shallow reclaimed shelves that displayed antique cameras mounted on a chalkboard painted wall. The back wall is to be covered with the Instagram photos taken by all the employees.

The Swarm badge is a bee motif. I found this great Osborne & Little wallpaper in a yellow/green, white and grey over-scaled pattern that referenced the beehive's architecture without being too literal. The Nelson pendants also subtly reference the hive while adding class and sophistication as well as a feeling of playfulness.

Bookworm is my personal favorite. Since it is the check-in for libraries, we wanted to create a cozy corner office. One line of books turned backwards revealing the simple texture of the book's pages evoking the diminishing time of 'the book.' Recycled magazine wallpaper from Pollack & Associates creates the backdrop again subtly referencing pages, words, their meanings and textures. Mix-matched chairs and a bench stacked with books all in varying brown tones help give this room an eclectic, lived in feeling.

Foursquare was an adventure in design and a great learning process for me as a designer. Everyone was great to work with and I was proud to be part of their team in my own way.

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Derek Stewart and Dennis Crowley appeared first on Dezeen.

IT company Sempla asked DAP Studio to design an office with a variety of open and private spaces.

The architects chose to retain some of the factory's industrial characteristics by leaving its structural skeleton exposed.

The bright white walls, desks and furniture provide a strong contrast with the existing building.

A ceiling-height white box houses a meeting room, while a tall cylinder provides a smaller private workspace.

The rest of the room is divided by screen walls decorated with perforated dots, which echo the patterned holes in the chairs.

We recently featured an office in London with a dark tunnel leading to the boardroom and another in Paris where the walls, shelves and desks are made from piles of modular blocks – see all offices.

In a recent opinion column, architect Sam Jacob called for an end to the "tyranny of fun" in office design – read more opinion on Dezeen.

Photographs are by Barbara Corsico.

Here's some more information from the architects:

The Sempla offices in Turin are housed in an old factory that has been transformed. We decided to crystallise and preserve the traces of the past and its degradation, enhancing the power of the contrast between the new and the old.

The thing that strikes you when you enter this office is the very strong, constant but delicate, dialogue that is established between the remnants of the factory's past and the new identity that has occupied the space with its new way of working and its objectives.

This silent interchange marks the passage from the industrial world to the advanced tertiary economy, fully representing the transformations underway and largely having already occurred in the city of Turin. Sempla is a company that deals with Information Technology. It is a system integrator that is active throughout Italy with resources of over five hundred people.

They needed to structure the space in such a way as to have "private" areas, such as meeting rooms, and freer "public" areas configured as open spaces, where the prevailing logic, instead of an assigned place, would be flexibility in terms of capacity and distribution of activities.

So what they needed, more than a "traditional" office was a place that functioned as a base camp and mainly a meeting area. The project sought to respond to these multiple needs, creating a space with barriers, more logical than physical, that allow us to maintain their way of working while reducing disturbance among the various teams.

We conceived large open spaces within which we could integrate more private areas, imagined almost as the sites of work performed by distinct and separate entities, as "other" places that could respond to particular needs of the work team. In the end, the plan was not based on the design of the work station, the chair-and-desk, but rather on the construction of relations.

Above: floor plan - click for larger image

Walking around the office, one has the feeling of being in an urban landscape in miniature with all its open and closed spaces, social spaces and private spaces. And this is a very powerful image. We started with the intention of creating a sort of labyrinth in which the meeting points were unexpected, something to be discovered with each new encounter. Naturally we thought about a hierarchy of paths, separated on the basis of dimensions into principal and secondary routes, as is typical in a city.

Above: section AA' - click for larger image

However, we also wanted those who lived in these spaces to be able to choose freely, according to their personality, needs, and desires, what path to follow, without showing them a predetermined route. During the design phase we dedicated a great deal of attention to creating variability that would favour this process because all the random or subjective choices of pathway may lead to unusual or unexpected meetings between people who may belong to different teams. This is something which we feel represents an essential factor for Sempla.

Above: section BB' - click for larger image

A fundamental part of the work is based precisely on dialogue and the exchange of ideas. The pathways intersect strategic meeting points which, on the spatial level, generate an “exchange of energies”, intermediate areas that are distinct from strictly working spaces, spaces which facilitate dialogue and informal relations.

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by DAP Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

As the UK headquarters for advertising agency 18 Feet & Rising, the offices were designed with a utilitarian aesthetic that can easily be replaced in a few years as the company grows.

Studio Octopi were asked to incorporate four qualities into the space; emergence, vortex, action and illusion. "Inspired by the client's four words, the project took on a theatrical approach," architect Chris Romer-Lee told Dezeen. "Surprise, anticipation, unease, fear and relief were all discussed in connection to the client's journey from arriving in the agency to getting into the boardroom."

The architects divided the office into three zones - designated for working, socialising and pitching - and differentiated them using low plywood screens and woven flooring with different patterns.

The dark-stained plywood tunnel is the largest installation in the space. With a tapered volume, it sticks out like a large funnel to announce the zone where client presentations take place.

"The tunnel acts as a cleansing device. All preconceptions of the agency are wiped before entering the boardroom," explained Romer-Lee.

Outside the boardroom, the workspaces are arranged in a curved strip that stretches from the entrance to the far wall. The steel-framed desks were designed by Studio Octopi last year and each one integrates power sockets and a lamp.

A kitchen and cafe area for staff is positioned at the centre of the curve, while informal areas for meetings or relaxing wrap around the perimeter as a series of window seats.

Romer-Lee runs Studio Octopi alongside co-director James Lowe. They also recently completed a courtyard house in the south-west of England. See more design by Studio Octopi.

Dezeen columnist Sam Jacob discussed offices designed for creative agencies in this week's Opinion piece, saying that "offices designed as fun palaces are fundamentally sinister". See more creative office interiors on Dezeen.

Photography is by Petr Krejčí.

Here's a project description from Studio Octopi:

After designing 18 Feet & Rising's work desks, Studio Octopi were commissioned to work on the fit-out of their new 5,300sqft offices in central London.

Appointment to completion of the fit-out was only a period of two months which was quicker than the time it took to design and build the 18 Feet & Rising work desks. To achieve this timeframe the client transferred full creative control to Studio Octopi. Only a brief four words were issued by the client; emergence, vortex, action and illusion.

CEO, Jonathan Trimble stated that all final approval decisions were granted to Studio Octopi. 18 Feet would collaborate as equal creative partner but not as client. It was agreed that the project would emerge on site.

We identified three principle zones within the agency: work, socialise and pitch. Each zone was then supported by a secondary tier of: read, make and plan. The zones were defined by black stained plywood walls and woven vinyl flooring. These act as theatrical devices in function and appearance. As with theatre the design enhances the presence and immediacy of the experience.

The work desks were arranged within a cog form. On entering the agency, the end of the cog disappears out of view. It is difficult to perceive the space denoted as a work zone, there is an illusionary aspect to the design. Power and data was taken off the existing overhead supply and distributed to the desks throughout the low plywood walls. Break out spaces are scattered to the perimeter provide views across neighbouring buildings. To the inside of the cog, the kitchen opens onto a central café seating area. There is no reception; the café area fulfils this role.

Above: floor plan - click for larger image

Joining the two units is a small opening. Views through the opening reveal the tunnel, the entrance to the boardroom. Approaching the entrance to the tunnel reveals more theatrics. The tunnel walls and sloping soffit are lined in ply however the supporting timber structure is visible on the other side. The tunnel reduces in height and width over its 7m length. The strong light at the end of the tunnel picks out the plywood grain and woven vinyl flooring. Within the boardroom the plywood stained walls form a backdrop for the imposing views of the Post Office Tower.

The client embraced the temporary appearance of utilitarian construction materials. As London's fastest growing independent ad agency, it's likely the design will be replaced within a few years. On this basis the fit-out is surprising, a little unnerving, and in places whimsical.

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by Studio Octopi appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in this week's column, Sam Jacob calls for an end to the "tyranny of fun" in office design.

I’m in what appears to be an office, surrounded by people who appear to be doing work. There’s a coffee machine, mugs, lever arch files, Post-it notes, hole punches, staplers, highlighters; in other words, the generic paraphernalia of business. This office, though, is not what it seems. It’s a project by Belgian artist Pieterjan Ginckels (pictured top, centre) titled S.P.A.M Office. Here, under his direction, a team of S.P.A.M. officers print, sort, file and mark up spam emails collated in the S.P.A.M mailbox.

Spam is the lowest form of commerce: unsolicited and unwanted, mass mailed, bot-written language skewed into an ever evolving digital-pidgin to evade filters. In S.P.A.M Office, they are scoured as though messages from another world for phrases and sentiments that suddenly resonate with a rich humanity.

But Ginckels is clear: the real purpose of the project is not the production of stuff or the creation of value, but to set in motion an office stripped of these usual demands of business. Here, without a bottom line, all the artifacts, behaviours and codes of office-ness gain an aesthetic, procedural and social clarity. Here is work - or at least one form of work - laid bare.

Work (as I’m sure needs no explaining to those of you surreptitiously sneaking a look at this site during office hours) is not a natural state. It has evolved into a highly codified, super-stratified state. Yet somehow its alien ideologies are submerged into a sense of inevitability, of this being the only reality imaginable. Business is an internationalised system and offices are the same across the globe. Think of the formula: lobbies, reception desks, suspended ceiling panels, laminated desks, PCs most likely running generic software designed to record a similar set of tasks and information. New York, London, Paris, Munich; coast to coast, LA to Chicago; Dublin, Dundee, Humberside; Primrose Hill, Staten Island, Chalk Farm and Massif Central all merge into a endless landscape of contract carpet tiles.

Above: S.P.A.M Furniture, designed by Ginckels

Design plays a huge part in enabling this totally generic vision of human activity. Leaf, for example, through an office supplies catalogue. Here, between the covers, are the tools of office-ness: a taxonomy of objects that inform, instruct and format our behaviours and activities. Overnight shipping promises that all this abstract serenity of boxfresh office-ness is ready to deploy to any location on the surface of the planet.

These are the most generic and ubiquitous of objects. From a design point of view their authorship is unattributed and for all they do to lubricate the smooth functioning of society (no exaggeration: how quickly do you think civilisation would fall without the hole punch or the stapler?) they are mostly uncelebrated.

Of course, there is also a high architecture and design tradition of workplace design. In fact, architecture and design are intrinsically linked to establishing ways of working. Perhaps it’s the typology where the inherent politics of spatial design become most visible, like a junkie’s raised vein. Architecture’s ability to spatialise hierarchies, to organise and then physically manifest power, makes it a central activity in the conceptualisation and reality of contemporary work. Workplace design implicates architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Great Work Room at the Johnson Wax factory (above) is the ground zero of modern bureaucratic space. Here we see the letter-typing clerk-ism necessary for a global cleaning product corporation manifested into sublime architectural form, its open plan made possible by giant mushroom-shaped columns pushing up a ceiling though which light filters down over orderly rows of desks.

We fast-forward in a Mad Men/IBM blur through an age of Miesian office towers whose blank replication expressed and enacted the high corporate era where one square metre replicates another, one floor is the same as another, one corporate man is like another.

We witness the way the Big Bang financial deregulation of the Thatcher era redrew floorplates to deep-plan flat floors, turning offices into vast interior landscapes whose horizons disappear into fluorescent haze. So far, so inevitable: it’s a straight-forward expansion of corporatism into space.

But post Big Bang something strange happens to offices. Instead of looking like offices, they start to appear to be anything but offices.

The Big Bang (27 October 1986) was the moment when we fully entered the post-industrial era, when the very idea of work radically changed. It was the moment when activities like media, advertising and music were dubbed "creative industries", repurposing the term from traditional industrial environments - factories or mines for example - which were simultaneously being closed either out of financial or ideological necessity. In late capitalism’s hall of mirrors, it’s no doubt inevitable that the image of work should invert to that of non-work.

The post-industrial workspace is, I would argue, defined by two distinct visions. First is Frank Gehry’s office for Chiat Day, Los Angeles (above). This project - from its giant binoculars by the sculptor Claes Oldenburg to its cardboard cave - conceives the office as a form of installation art, a landscape of endless difference. It represents the workplace as a non-stop experience that reinvents work not as a task but as pure self-expression.

The other vision of the post-industrial office came from the interior-design-meets-managment-consultancy of architect Frank Duffy & his firm DEGW. Here quantifiable metrics and business psychology met colour schemes and bean bags in a cocktail that appealed directly to business’s unending appetite for theories, strategies, quackery and god knows what else. Just look at the business shelves of a bookstore for more evidence of this. There’s more superstition in business than in the astrology page of a tabloid newspaper, more faith-over-reason than in the queue for a fairground fortune teller, more self-obsessed introspection than on a therapist's couch.

A third model was developed, (with full disclosure, by my own firm, FAT) for Amsterdam-based communications company KesselsKramer in 1998 (above). The design deployed, in the already incredible interior of a church, fragments of other environments: lifeguard towers, Russian wooden forts, garden sheds, patches of football pitch and a picnic table extended to boardroom size. The thinking was twofold. These surreal juxtapositions would act as a landscape within which the culture of the company could be manifested spatially and organisationally. At the same time, its explicit references to a range of other types of place: home, park, sports field and so on, disrupted conventions of workspaces. It was, at the time, a determined antidote to the slick working environments of advertising and communications offices.

All three examples have trickled into the mainstream, spawning the ubiquitous astroturfed, supposed fun palaces that characterise digital, media and communication office design. Plastered with domestic wallpapers that have long since lost their edgy irony, punctured by playground slides linking one floor with another, their forced entertainment has a sinister tone. These are places of perpetual adolescence, whose playground references sentence their employees to a never-ending Peter Pan infantilism.

These spaces of west-coast-uber-alles business ideology might be seen as a denial of the very real power structures inherent in labour relations. And their denial of these dynamics through apparent fun and the sensation of individualism could be seen to operate as a form of oppression. More fundamentally sinister is the idea of work colonising the real spaces of intimacy and freedom: when your office resembles all the places that you go to escape work, maybe there is no escape from work itself.

So perhaps, now the tyranny of fun is all played out, we should take Ginckels’ lead. Maybe it’s only by looking hard into the generic-ness of workplace design that we can find ways of really disrupting ideologies of work for the better. Grab your hole punch and a lever arch file and pin a note to the hessian pin board: declare a moratorium on slides in offices.

S.P.A.M. Office is at ANDOR Gallery London until 9 March 2013.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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are fundamentally sinister" appeared first on Dezeen.