Corner of Taranaki and Wakefield Street - Wellington, NZ

We designed the building you see here for our developer client. Xero had been secured as a tenant and our task was to create a new building to accommodate them utilising an existing two storey heritage building as the base. Whilst the fitout design was handled by others, we had a role to modify the interior base building to reflect their requirements. The collaboration to achieve this resulted in some great solutions - re-purposing floor joists as cladding to a central stair/atrium.

Our design philosophy is to mirror the bulk and form of the heritage Manthel Building with a simplified reflection above. We’ve designed a screen of semi-transparent mesh that covers most of the upper building. This material is held off the face of the main building and creates a layer that is opaque from the outside in bright sunlight and becomes almost transparent at night. It’s a sunscreen around the outside. Window boxes provide dedicated meeting and gathering spaces with a direct connection with the street. There’s three of these – two along Wakefield street and one above the entrance on Taranaki Street. The development provides five large open floor plates with daylight on three sides.