By CUSTANCE
Designed to foster Fisher & Paykel’s R&D strategy, this extensive re-fit of an existing factory will cater to F&P’s growing product design and engineering team, accomodating 400+ employees. At the heart is the ‘Social Kitchen’ with a timber louvre ceiling and natural light filtering from two large funnels in the ceiling. The kitchen provides a setting for F&P’s engineers and designers to engage with their products on a daily basis.
Custance developed a modular pod system with fully illuminated ceilings and writable/magnetic design walls. Additional lightwells bring a spread of natural light throughout the floor which also supports large trees and extensive planting. This realised F&P’s desire to extract the design process from individual workspaces and make the knowledge visible, encouraging a more collaborative design process.
Custance engaged collaboratively with Fisher & Paykel Product Development, merging the respective design processes and ideas. The result was a world class environment that clearly reflected the principles of how we work as an organisation. Custance continued this collaborative approach through the project build to ensure the design was achieved to the highest standard, and importantly, cost effectively. The partnership with Custance produced a workplace that we can be equally proud of.
Wayne Jones
Product Design Manager, F&P Appliances
As a design led organisation, Fisher and Paykel had some key principles we wanted to live out in our new design centre. Custance worked closely with us to understand our core brand values, culture and design thinking. They also understood the importance of quality of detail and materials. Custance have a created an adaptable, multi-use workplace that is not only highly creative and inspirational, but is improving the productivity and quality of design across the wide range of activities we undertake.
Mark Elmore
GM Design, F&P Appliances
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.