By CUSTANCE
Continuing from the positive transformation of their Product Design Centre in Auckland, Fisher & Paykel were keen to incorporate the key elements into their new Australian HQ. A fresh approach sought to apply similar logic to a new context, responding to a different location, scale, building type and a more corporate, sales focused team.
At reception, guests are greeted and guided towards the showroom, Social Kitchen or meeting rooms. The Social Kitchen is symbolically placed at the office core as a site of sociability, collaboration, creativity and eating together. A sweeping, curved plywood ceiling floats above, providing an organic element that transforms an otherwise standard, rectilinear office floor. Breaking the flat ceiling plane allows the feature to create a central focus, highlighting the conceptual and physical ‘heart’ of the facility, while achieving a sense of volume and height. F&P is interested in the lives lived around their products, and the best way to bring this touch-point into the workplace is a usable kitchen where staff can use the products daily.
Flexible meeting pods border the Social Kitchen, guiding circulation, providing privacy to workstations and offering a natural destination for collaboration. Interesting view shafts span across the office floor ensuring connection and cohesion. Workstations take advantage of views and natural light, while utility spaces contained as timber slatted pods, buffer the nearby workspace. New growth of up to 90 staff is achieved by clipping a double bay to each workstation cluster and repositioning free standing storage elements.
B&W finishes are central to the palette, featuring photography that reinforces F&P’s brand strategy. Colour creates graphic ‘rugs’ within meeting pods, low seating elements and screens. Timber provides warmth and intimacy, an appropriate backdrop to residential appliances. Rolled white alucobond, black aluminium framing and precision glass sliding doors coupled with clean detailing reflects the design and attention to detail of F&P’s product. The 3D plywood ceiling was created using 2D elements in a simple, cost effective way. 3D software compatible with a CNC cutting machine achieved the required precision. 2400mm x 2400mm modules of light weight marine ply with slotted blades avoid the need for fixings.
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.