Nowadays, it takes a lot for an office to be classed as truly cool. Pool tables, pianos, puppies and slides are all pretty passé. But here are five places where going to work feels like a treat.
1) White Mountain Office
Deep underneath Stockholm in a former nuclear shelter hewn from the rocks lurks … no, not some kind of monster or supervillain, but the office of Bahnhof, a Swedish Internet Service Provider. Architect Albert France-Lanord happily admitted that his main influences in designing White Mountain Office came from science fiction films, and it really shows.
2) Inventionland Design Factory
Really, this is lots of different cool offices in one: 70,000 square feet of pirate ships, racetracks, caves, treehouses, castles. Even a giant shoe! It’s like working inside the mind of a particularly inventive child. No wonder employees there manage to come up with so many interesting new ideas.
3) McLaren Technology Centre
Based in the heart of the Surrey countryside, this is where Formula One racing cars get designed, built and tested. Based around a 475 foot long wind tunnel used for testing, everything about the offices is sleek and stylish, with cool glass walkways and great views of the enormous lake that is also used to help cool the building, and down onto the garages where some of the cars are displayed.
4) Selgas Cano office
Perhaps surprisingly, Selgas Cano are the only architectural firm to have made it onto this list. The Selgas Cano office makes the most of its brilliant woodland location, and then some. Glass walls and ceilings look out on the forest floor and up at the leafy canopy, the clean modern lines in glass and sparkling white contrasting beautifully with the wild and natural surroundings.
5) Pallotta Teamworks
The ‘Apostrophe’ in California where fundraising company Pallotta Teamworks has its headquarters deserves huge amounts of kudos for turning one of the most hated features of modern office life, the cubicle, into something fun, quirky and innovative. How did they do that? Simple. Instead of placing the cubicles beside one another, they stacked them on top of one another. The warehouse is divided into ‘work neighbourhoods’ using white tent tops fastened to shipping containers, in which the executive offices are located. And while most of the other offices on this list required big money, the Apostrophe’s innovative design comes from the fact that they had a budget of only 2 million USD to turn an old and empty warehouse into inspiring headquarters. That’s only about 40 USD per square foot, about half the going rate.
This article was written in association with Office Angels. Office Angels filling PA Jobs in offices like these since 1986.
Don’t build a bedroom, build an oicffe. Tons of pictures and ideas if you google enough. Most are retrofitted bedrooms though, so some of their cute solutions for using closet space may not be helpful to you. What I would do for an oicffe may have nothing to do with your needs. But the big issues are flat surfaces and storage. (do you need counters, a place for the laminator machine, or some graphical layout space? Over large printer? dual monitors? Inks and art supplies? 100 books? A TV? WIll you have visitors? What do they need? Their own flat surface, oversize computer monitor to look over your shoulder? Every oicffe is different.Make list of equipment and needs. Then do a scale drawing before you cut a single piece of wood. Put in lots of electric outlets and don;t forget about UPS.