Our head office has moved from its current location to new accommodation. Having been at 1 Alie Street for 13 years our lease has now expired. With the landlord reconfiguring the whole building we started a search for a new home in early 2019. Ably assisted by Newton Perkins, our agent, we viewed many opportunities eventually settling for a newly refurbished CAT A space opposite our current address.
10 Alie street offers us fresh new space in this rapidly changing part of London. This move has enabled us to implement an agile working strategy to maximise the efficiency of our accommodation, improve flexibility for our staff, whilst emphasising and generally improving wellbeing through the provision of a range of individual working environments. A specific study of occupancy and working practices demonstrated we were a perfect candidate to undertake the evolution from a more traditional style of working to an anonymised desking arrangement and with the assistance of our Agile Working Consultant, Baker Stuart, we have had the confidence to take this forward.
The CAT A status offered us a blank canvas for our Interior Design team to work with our chosen contractor, furniture, fixtures and fittings suppliers to create an exciting space. We have divided the office into a larger ‘Collaborate’ environment and a smaller, quieter area, we are calling ‘Concentrate’. Collaborate consists of a more traditional fixed desk arrangement for undertaking fixed pieces of work from a computer or tablet. However, the space also includes a small meeting room for confidential interaction, a high bench for layout and touch down, an enclosed booth for 4-6 person ‘huddle’ meetings and a large central hub adjacent to the kitchen for eating and more collaborative ‘open’ style workshops. Concentrate on the other hand includes our larger meeting room, 1-person telephone booths (for laptop work or phone calls), a 2-person 1:1 area, a high touch down bench and a couple of 1-person study booths for intense pieces of individual work. Soft seating is also located in this area for casual low-key meetings and incidental laptop work.
The space has been finished in a contemporary way with natural wall claddings from Innerspace, innovative flooring designs from Interface and unique furniture from a variety of designers, supplied by Rainbow.
Our staff are now operating in a truly mixed multi-disciplinary way, creating bespoke teams for varied periods of time in our flexible spaces, ensuring we make the best of our skills, so providing an efficient yet comprehensive service for all of our clients.
We look forward to our London office flourishing in its new home whilst embracing a new way of working, and will watch with interest as our client base, staff and workload grows.