Colourful office interiors that brighten up the working day

Colourful environments are infectiously joyful places to be. But workplaces aren’t primary schools, and employees aren’t toddlers – though they may sometimes act like it. So simply splashing some primary colour on the walls won’t cut the mustard when redesigning the workplace for the post-Covid era, where creativity, collaboration and face-to-face interactions are the USP. In order to win the fight for employees' hearts and put hats back on the hatstand, bold colours, textures and surfaces not only help to add character and comfort to communal workplace environments, but with carefully considered application, can also define their ever-more complicated spatial typologies.

A young, fashion-conscious film production and post-production studio in Barcelona, brimming with creativity and personality, needed a new office space for its rapidly expanding team. Although filled with natural afternoon light, served by wide windows across two sides, the 650-sqm hanger that would become Sauvage TV’s new home was initially devoid of character.

‘The inspiration for the interior design project has been the streets of the city of Barcelona and their idiosyncrasy,’ explain architects, Cosy Barcelona, tasked with presenting the studio’s strong personality within the space. ‘Chromaticism is a fundamental aspect of the project, managing to contrast the industrial brutalism of concrete and steel with striking primary colours,’ they state. By separating dark edit suites from open workspaces and more private meeting rooms with colourful steel or steel-framed glass walls respectively, well-defined staff flows between environments were created, while allowing or obstructing light into each.

As a technology platform that allows users to start online businesses from home, Shopify understood when its own workforce wanted to work from theirs. Remote work is still proven to be no substitute, however, for the traditional office environment when creativity and collaboration are required. So when tasked with redesigning the Canadian firm’s Berlin office, MVRDV had to rethink what the office is for, ‘maximising the building’s potential as a base for working collaboratively with others, brainstorming new ideas and engaging in the company’s vibrant culture,’ as the Dutch practice explains.

Instead of lining up desks in a row, the redesign focuses on both face-to-face meetings and experiences. Each ‘on-site’ room, for example, is split into two possible meeting space formats, with a long table in one half and a cosier, colour-coded and curtained space for more relaxed meet-ups in the other. ‘Experience rooms’, meanwhile, include spaces more akin to public parks and bars, for social company gatherings and casual work, while the reception area is flanked by references to Berlin’s visual culture, with U-Bahn-inspired metro tiles adorning the reception desk to one side and a street art mural by Caroline Amaya on the other.

While both the Sauvage TV and Shopify office redesigns help communicate their dynamic corporate culture to employees, some workplaces use their office environments as external marketing tools as well. The Market Building showroom is one such concept developed by bathroom fittings manufacturer, Coalbrook. It’s a dual-purpose showroom for manufacturers to present their wares to architects and interior designers in realistic home and hospitality settings, while providing them with meeting and office space to communicate the product selections to their clients.

‘Inspired by the lost forms of the industrial revolution,’ explain Holloway Li, the architects ‘worked closely with a network of master craftspeople to subvert the materiality of industrial backdrops, eschewing traditional expectations of a showroom to form a surreal internal landscape.’ Indeed, rather than the over-lit, thick-carpeted expanse of a standard showroom, The Market Building instead feels like an interactive museum, with a historically-researched character you can sense in the air. Creative and innovative product displays include tapware on Victorian bathroom wall panels in orange and amber resin, inside huge opened-up distillation sills in a subterranean engine room and magnetic pipe-framed boards for clients to mix and match various products together.

When interior design company BOHO Décor moved to new offices, it ensured the space would impress both employees and their clients, by completing the redesign themselves. Being set low down on the second and third floors of a busy city block, however, meant the interior lacked both light and views, encouraging the designers to, as they put it, ‘create an alternative oasis of view for the people,’ by focusing their attentions internally, instead.

‘Colour blocks, hollow geometric shapes and see-through glass are simultaneously used to divide spaces without building boundaries and blocking visions,’ explains BOHO Décor, using ‘colours to set the right mood and tone for each distinctive space.’ For example, bright yellow is utilised to inspire creativity in communal and collaborative areas, while meeting rooms are covered in deep blues and greens, representing wisdom and growth.

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