Bambora Office in Stockholm by MER

It’s an unwritten rule. Once you become an adult you stop behaving like a kid. You’re not allowed to imagine things like a kid does. And certainly if you run a company, you sure as hell don’t design your new office like a kid might. It’s against the rules.

That is unless you’re Bambora – a revolutionary finance company that has bought out over 11 start ups since its creation in 2015. If you’re Bambora you throw out the rule book, if you ever read it to start with. But what does the word Bambora mean? Good question. They made it up. That’s what your imagination is for. To make things up. And they picked a logo for it that’s something out of a Grimm’s Brothers fairy tale; an animal that’s a cross between a zebra and a giraffe.

If they’ve turned e-commerce on it’s ear, it’s hardly surprising then to see what they did in conjunction with their architects MER, to their head office. The first thing that strikes you as you walk into their office is the dominant zebra stripe on the floor. Its pattern is so audacious, its hard not to feel a little off balance by it. But as your eyes adjust to the black and white stripes you realise the pattern goes half way up the wall. Or is that the wall coming down to the floor? It’s like looking at an Escher print but with 3-D goggles on. As your brain slowly adjusts to the bold print it becomes clear that what you are looking at is the geometric shape of the reception desk, also made from black and white stripes. Mirror stripes to be precise.

Sitting primly above it, mounted to the reception wall is the company’s mascot, it’s logo, and clearly its design inspiration. A black and white stripped giraffe. Or is it a zebra? A quick Google will tell you it’s an Okapi, native to the Congo in Central Africa. Ah of course, why not!?

Whilst the workspace is almost joyful in it’s playfulness it is not so much childish as exuberant. MER, the architects of this grown up fantasyland, have managed to imbue a sophistication into this fun, devil may care palate and they’ve done it by meticulously considering the design details.

The African savannah zebra carpet extends into the waiting room where a golden covered couch, nested inside a dark, thick frame starts to say ‘I’m a grown up’ again. Sitting in front of a beautifully detailed black, three-dimensional, geometric, patterned wall of storage; you get to see how playfulness meets design-detailing integrity. It really is a stunning combination.

The bright blue, chunky kiddie chairs in Bambora’s open plan meeting room seem more at home in a kindergarten and are offset by a simple black table with a contemporary, black triangular lamp above. However, it is the exquisite, white-mesh backdrop that lends the first real level of restraint and sophistication to this design. It’s this element that tells you that someone grown up did have something to do with it. The kindy kid may have got to pick the chairs but the grown up wasn’t in the other room leaving them to run the show completely.

This patterning on patterning theme continues elsewhere on the floor. A black and white, oval-linked, patterned wallpaper, a nod to the 60’s, slides down the wall to wrap itself around a couch leaning against it. It’s this type of fun, animated application that is echoed throughout the fitout.

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Low sheen, black walls front windowless meeting rooms; a brave decision by any measure. But an infinitely creative one. They are brought to life by a golden sheen coming from within the boxed space. Yellow leopard skin carpet runs up against golden, timber wall panelling and bright, buttercup yellow chairs glow underneath a simple length of florescent light. Or why not pop into the meeting room next to it with it’s golden, zebra carpet and the Austin Powers inspired gold, patterned wallpaper. Standing on the sobering black carpet looking into this glowing Aladdin’s cave is quite something else.

There are open plan meeting spaces, yes. But you have to sit on an oversized cushion/couch that resembles a red, blood infused brain if you do. And high above sits the white glowing skull, the bone-casing ready to lower down onto it. Kids have such wild imaginations. Anything goes.

The workstation cubicles decked in plywood with oversized, black, chunky framing double as storage lockers for the employees. There is not a square inch of this space that hasn’t been thoroughly explored and over imagined.

Even the chairs in the boardroom don’t balance properly, a leg on each chair decidedly shorter than the others, making them lean disconcertingly around the table. But it’s not really a meeting table. It’s set up like a ping-pong table. Or is it? To be honest it looks like a meeting room that might have come straight out of a scene in the Matrix. It’s hard to know if someone is about to be interrogated in this austere room, or if the space might start to fold in on itself and become an entirely new space altogether.

If finance used to be seen as a conservative, bean counting industry, filled with beige, boring people, then this fit out will have forever changed that perception.

Nothing is what it seems here. It is all entirely preposterous. Fabulously so.