Project leader, Dennis Keighron-Foster added, “At Melbourne our most important asset is our team. That’s why we wanted to create a space that would reflect the ethos of the company – a family-run business that puts its staff at the heart of everything we do.”

Many aspects of the new office design mirror those of a home including lighting, casual seating areas, and furniture choices. Also included are ”a kitchen housed in a potting shed, a grassed picnic area for lunches and informal meetings, an art deco dining room, a library and a retro quiet space.”

When asked if new space brought with it any new dynamics in office culture, it was described that the new space works to more easily enable employee recreation such as playing pool on the fluorescent table or enjoy a nice X-box session. While the social areas are quite popular, the study has often been used by employees for a little bit of quiet time.

Keighron-Foster added: “For us, creativity and productivity go hand in hand. If people are inspired by their working environments they are more likely to perform to the best of their ability. Grey and boring is not what we’re about and this new space completely reflects our personality.”

“There’s a general consensus that the new office space would really benefit from having music played quietly in the background; it’s something that we’re looking to implement very soon.  We’ve also found that as we’ve now got more space, we seem to be far less ‘on top of each other’.”

If you could implement one feature of Melbourne’s office into your space, which would you choose?

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Dubbed ‘L4′, the space was built as the London office’s engineering floor which houses around 350 Googlers.

It has all the essentials from desks and chairs to 19 flavors of coffee and billiards. Conference spaces offer multi-level seating, video-conferencing, and Vitra Panton chairs.

Anyone have thoughts on who fitted out the space?  I’m nto familiar with many of the furniture items in there.

Enjoy!

“We believe we work better in light, bright surroundings, so we moved to new premises in May 2008. We’d outgrown our old office, so it made a refreshing change to have everyone under one roof. The building started life as an old school, then it was a cinema and for many years it was the heart of the community as the church hall. Then it went up for sale and, despite the huge challenge, the Michon brothers took it on and lovingly restored it to its former glory.

From energy efficient underfloor heating to workstations made from recycled materials, we used as many green features as possible.”

“Innocent moved into the whole of the Canal Building at Portobello Dock in April 2011. We won the job to design the fit out and rework the building to suit their brief. The key move was to remove a significant part of the first floor to create a double height communal space which overlooks the canal basin and is the heart of the workspace. The office floors feature the ubiquitous grass carpet, and bespoke desking designed by Tom Dixon.”

This office was restored by architects SHH and is located in an old London 5-story building. The space is extremely bright, with its white walls and great lighting fixtures. The herringbone flooring is fantastic, and reminds me a lot of another office posted a while back, Applicake.

This project’s offices are only located on the first floor, where you can see an open-style space for general staff, with a more luxurious and large space reserved for the company’s executive. Also, don’t forget to enjoy a nice looksie at the bathroom, where it could be incredibly awkward to have a restroom break mid-day. The office space also contains two original fireplaces.

A much more in-depth write-up on the space at Contemporan.

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