By CUSTANCE
Booster is a financial services company that is fully owned and operated in New Zealand with a strong focus on investing in successful New Zealand businesses. Showcasing these businesses was an important aspect of their brief to Custance when creating their new facility in the Aon Centre, 1 Willis Street. It was also important that the new offices have a New Zealand vibe, be smart and professional but also modest.
An angled shelving unit in the lobby offers flexible display for companies that Booster support whilst also providing screening to the adjacent conference room. The lobby opens up to a generous café and gathering space, whilst the open plan office space wraps around the remaining three sides of the building and consists of a variety of seating, desking, meeting rooms and call centre to suit their different work modes. The material and colour palette references New Zealand’s west coast beaches providing a warm, natural and relaxed space with pops of joy and interest.
Over 30 years Custance has become a respected and multi-award winning practice. Using our collective knowledge, experience and empathy, we have created spaces that transform people’s lives and better equip them to accommodate change.
The tools we traditionally use are strategic planning, architecture, interior design and industrial design, however we have learned to wield them in different ways. We have developed these tools to allow people and organisations to experience space that is fully human and fully alive; space to live well, to create, to innovate and to grow – to enable face to face contact in a way that digital space does not.
Clients return to us in both New Zealand and for 14 years now, Australia, where we’ve built a multi-disciplinary, trans-Tasman practice that focuses on people and their well being, not just the places we build for them. We believe in human touch and those two words hold the secret of our longevity.
Before we begin any commission, whether a home , a corporate interior, a new building, an urban master plan or a strategic vision, we begin by discovering answers to fundamental human questions. Who? What? Why? For us these come before the traditional ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ of the brief and build specifications. They help us see beyond immediate needs. They help us understand people and design spaces that have enduring value.