Hardhat Digital Melbourne HQ by Davidov Partners.

Davidov Partners have recently completed a fit-out for Hardhat Digital agency in Melbourne’s Prahran. The office interior is broken into two primary spaces – work and play, but these lines are often blurred.

The main work area was conceived as a common table that has been contorted to fit within the irregular space. The big idea for the fit out was to create a workspace that allowed for maximum flexibility for a highly fluid team completely devoid of hierarchy, allowing the entire team to sit at the same table. This allows working groups to loosely gather along the common spine, interacting with other groups regularly, rather than working in traditional segregated clusters on individual projects. This common spine encourages accelerated knowledge transfer and greater efficiencies and economies.

The response was to remove as many of the existing walls that existed as part of the previous fit out – a rabbit’s warren of offices and corridors. What was left was an irregular room with excellent cross ventilation and natural light. The common spine, due to the length of space required, snakes and bends its way back and forth through the space creating different zones that lend themselves to be used as conversation areas, break out space or nooks for concentration.

Visitors and clients to the office are welcomed into a large reception space mocked up as a street style basketball court. This space doubles to facilitate regular seminars, in house training sessions and impromptu meetings where the vast walls become the canvas.

Besides the traditional boardroom and smaller meeting rooms, the desire to create another idiosyncratic space was developed – whisky bar, referencing the cliché of the advertising world in which the clients finds themselves while also referencing the basketball court aesthetic of the reception area. The room conveniently doubles as a fully functioning meeting room and allows clients and staff to engage in a less formal environment screened from the familiar ingredients of modern commerce.

We previously featured the work of Davidov Partners in our April 2013 Spotlight.

[Photography by Andrew Wuttke.]