An interesting and really cost effective way to add drama to a basic t-bar ceiling. Hatch Interior Design used Peak Foldscape tiles by MIOculture.
If you follow us on Social Media you know we’ve been posting small little snippets of construction at our Client Urban Jungle’s space recently. The project is now complete and we’ll follow up with some final photos for your viewing pleasure soon, but before the big reveal…another teaser!
Some of Urban Jungle‘s stationary designed in conjunction with Valery Goulet and used by Hatch to help inform the interior design direction so that it would help to strengthen the company’s brand.
Urban Jungle is a leading brand marketing firm in Edmonton and we’ve worked with them before. Last time we were on the receiving end of their service – they’ve helped us define our brand strategy and have aided us with refining our marketing materials for years. Now it was our turn to help them as Interior Design consultants as they redefined themselves by moving to a new location in Edmonton’s Cloverdale district.
With a new website and slight re-brand occurring internally at Urban Jungle, we had a lot of creative stuff to work from. Our client, being extremely organized, put together a design brief and brand package to help shape our design process and had one major stipulation – we had a budget of about $6000…gulp. There’s nothing like a tight budget to get those creative juices a-flowing and we were ready for the challenge.
Urban Jungle provided Hatch Interior Design with a number of images that inspired UJ’s own visual platform aiming to in turn inspire the interiors of their new commercial office space.
Now just to make things even more interesting, our Client did not lease this space alone. The Foundry Real Estate Co., a new brokerage firm (going through the process of brand development and business start-up), would be occupying the space as well. This would be considered a design test in any case, but being that the space was very long and narrow, this posed additional challenges. We really had to consider how to incorporate two spaces in a way that was neutral yet identifiable for both brands.
Here is a floor plan of the new Urban Jungle and The Foundry Real Estate Co. space to give you an idea of how the Hatch Interior Designers divided space while reusing existing rooms to stay on budget and to remain consistent with our sustainable design goals.
We solved the design challenge in a number of ways. Spatially we were able to re-purpose some of the existing spaces – the boardroom, general reception area, staff kitchen and washroom. Our approach was to then equally divide the remaining open area to create two defined spaces for UJ and The Foundry to co-exist.
Once that floor plan was defined, we did what any designer would do. Start brainstorming on Pinterest – naturally! We pin ideas that inspire us almost daily and then wait for the project that speaks to some of those ideas. Not all of the ideas make the cut, but they all help to inspire the design process and help us hone in on the best solutions for our Clients. Check out our Urban Jungle Pinterest board to see some of those ideas.
We were really inspired by a couple of projects: “The Citizen Office Concept” by Vitra and “Insight Ad Agency” by SNELL Architects.
From there the design concept blossomed. We decided that a neutral palette with small pops of colour (none defined by either brand) would be applied through shared areas. Each company’s individual space could then be defined by their own brand platform. Again, we had to do this in a very inexpensive way. When we heard the word affordable, we immediately imagined the use of a very basic and economical material, plywood. And really, this single material became the springboard for the entire concept.
A conceptual rendering of the reception desk and waiting area that our Interior Designers created to help our Client visualize the proposed design.
As part of our design process we typically work with SketchUp to create basic conceptual perspectives for our Clients. This is an aerial view of Urban Jungle’s office space.
Our Interior Designers had a lot of fun working with Urban Jungle on this project. Our Client was also pretty excited about their new space; so excited that they actually filmed most of the construction process and blogged about it here. Check out their fast-motion video below.
We’ll have some final project photos to show you soon, but to tide you over, here are a few of the sneak-peek construction photos, some from our recent hoots.
