Photography App VSCO’s Oakland HQ by DeBartolo Architects.

The team at photography app VSCO have moved into one of Oakland’s last remaining historic downtown buildings. DeBartolo Architects designed the space by stripping its interiors to bare bones, and creating an office without any partitions to encourage openness and transparency. Even the glass conference room is positioned in the centre of the space, in plain view of staff and visitors.

‘We took the building back to structural wood and concrete and glass,’ explains the architect, Jack DeBartolo. ‘By doing that, it really exposed the structure and the bones of this building.’ Additions were deliberately kept to a minimum. ‘It was very obvious that whatever we put back in the space had a higher level of importance to it,’ adds DeBartolo.

The new insertions are mainly lose and freestanding – from workstations, to part height joinery and lose furniture clusters in shared areas. With just enough sprinkling of furniture classics to offset the industrial nature of the space, the interior feels grown up and sophisticated, with plenty of personality and finer grain to keep things interesting. 10 points from us.

[Images courtesy of DeBartolo Architects. Photography by Mariko Reed.]