Surface Design Awards – Complete

• COMMERCIAL BUILDING - INTERIOR
  Commercial Buildings that are used for commercial purposes, and include retail, hospitality, workplaces, factories and warehouses and buildings where commercial services are provided. At least 50 percent of the buildings’ floor space will be used for commercial activities.

Education First (EF) is a major international company offering study abroad, language learning, cultural exchange and academic degree programs around the world. Its headquarters building in London is the centre of their international activity and houses a large and diverse group working in all sectors. EF’s progressive culture provides good collective places and facilities for sociability and eating during the working day, which often extends into the evening because of the different time zones in which the company works.

EF’s headquarters occupy the ground and first floor plinth of a 1960’s modernist development of residential towers. It has an interesting history of use, originally as a car showroom and later as a data centre. EF’s in-house design team had made interventions in the building in the recent past and gave us a foundational brief for further changes that reflected the company’s developing patterns of work and sociability.

In the scheme we realised, visitors arrive in the centre of the ground floor where they see the reception desk and a new wider and more dignified stair up to the first floor. To the right a view through a glass screen shows the new cafe bar, the place for office time recreation, lunching and afterwork sociability and its rear part, which is divided by a glass screen and seating bank so that can also be used for meetings and briefings. To the left hand side of the entrance working spaces of EF can be seen through a glass screen. Together with the cafe bar, they are visible through the ground floor windows, giving visitors a sense of the culture of EF as they arrive.

On the first floor the offices were reorganised to place working spaces close to the window, the ventilation ductwork and lighting modified to serve the working area more effectively and a long corridor opened up to connect the back and front of the building. A vehicle ramp from when the building was a car showroom has been made into characterful meeting room with windows to the surrounding offices. The effect of our scheme is to create different characters in each part of the workspace and pleasure in the places where people come together, formally and informally.

2019
£4m

We settled on an Italian tile that, to us, was inspired by Carlo Scarpa's Olivetti showroom in Venice. The manufacturer had produced a large, and thin tile with a printed surface redolent of terrazzo with a regular marble pattern, with different levels of reflectance on the 'materials'. The tile was available as a pair of inverted colours, and we decided to use both. Though many changes of design and materials occurred as the multi-stage project developed the tiles remained. They are wearing well.

Ceramica Sant’Agostino Gem White and Gem Pearl 900 x 900 x 10mm

Rather than build a new office, our changes were made to improve the way of working in EF's existing building, carried out while still working in four phases.

Given the history of the building, as an early 20th Century car body works, remodelling in the 1960's, establishing a new floor level that was consistent across the ground floor required that a thin, characterful and robust floor surface would be necessary. Given the wear that the entrance lobby for a large office, and a cafe which functions for get-togethers, informal meetings and workspace as well as the dangers of spillages, options were limited.