Bresic Whitney Hunters Hill HQ by Chenchow Little.

Sydney super star architects Chenchow Little have designed the 180sqm Hunters Hill office for Bresic Whitney as an open plan collaborative office environment accommodating 15-20 staff and displaying the agencies significant collection of contemporary art.

The office is envisioned as a baroque village or townscape set within its tenancy envelope. Independent meeting rooms, workstations and a bathroom core are considered as elemental figures dropped into a container; figures that twist in scale and orientation to create contracting and expanding spaces, guiding open circulation paths. As a result, a loose pattern of streets emerge as continuous circuits without a dead end. It is a carefully composed randomness that implies zones through geometry without the need for formal boundaries. Through the control of sight-lines and volumes, spaces spill out and leak in reception and working areas, before reaching pinch-points that create moments of tension. The resulting space is non-hierarchical and permeable, encouraging interaction between the different areas of the office.

The project team made a decision to keep the existing shell and services untouched to maximise the height of the space available, conserve resources and provide a character befitting the client’s ethos. Within this raw shell, a pristine tray of timber has been inserted that seamlessly folds from floor to wall, culminating in a folded pelmet that stops shy of the exposed tenancy ceiling. This new timber tray hugs the existing tenancy division, creating a beautiful periphery that nothing touches, in turn maximising surface area available for the display of artwork.

The insertion of the timber tray multiplies the layering within the space. The geometry can be best described as an unfolding box, with points that connect and peel away to reveal small fragments of the existing raw shell. Through juxtaposition, a logic of ‘old’ and ‘new’ is clearly legible. Similar to the timber side walls, the meeting rooms stop short of the exposed ceiling to give the impression that the space is taller than it actually is. Conceived as abstract houses, the meeting rooms are contained by their own pitched roofs, becoming rooms within a room. Internal skylights provide a vertical glimpse of the exposed ceiling and services.

Workstations are suspended from the ceiling upon thin black skeletal frames – appearing to “float” above the ground plane. Horizontality is prioritised in the banding of direct task lighting and indirect ambient uplighting and used as a graphical device to elongate the sense of space in a small interior. A natural palette of materials has been used with subtle tonal variation in mind. American oak timber, brass, and bronze mirror have been used within a thin black steel frame. A folded and perforated brass screen veils Meeting Rooms, providing a balance between privacy and permeability by reducing figures to silhouettes.

The design is not about features, but rather a crafted and delicate composition of elements: the result of applying a macro-scale strategy to the micro-scale.

[Images courtesy of Chenchow Little. Photography by Peter Bennetts.]