Office Interior in Strasbourg by Nicola Spinetto

It’s not often you see Brutalist inspired architecture paired with the fine, sophisticated lines of Scandi design. But here, in the offices of West Forever, a Harley Davidson Motorcycle Tour Company, you get both. Designed by the avant-garde Italian architects, Nicola Spinetto, it’s a beautiful synergy of raw materials meeting refined ones.

Located at the docks of Strasbourg, their new headquarters sit appropriately in the restored old Seegmuller warehouse. Where more might one expect to find a motorcycle travel company than in a large warehouse? If the objective was to create a hybrid space that encapsulated both an office and workshop, cleverly they have achieved both. In the process of doing so, Nicola Spinetto has left the cavernous space to speak for itself.

The concrete columns in the general workspace are left unashamedly bare, revealing the simple material of its past and giving the workplace gravitas. Something you might expect from the inspiration derived from these gusty two wheeled machines. Yet this weighty material is offset by the lightness of the timber-battened partitions that unobtrusively delineate boundaries. It really is all so beautifully orchestrated.

The ceilings and walls are whitewashed and the acres of concrete floors finished in a transparent resin. There’s no apology for the hardness. Instead, there’s a wonderful artistic New-York-loft feel to the space. Designing motorcycles is no doubt both a creative and engineering endeavour, and so Spinetto expresses the same with the interior, leaving exposed the aluminium ductwork and perforated, galvanised steel cable trays. It gives the space an industrial quality, a workshop feel.

But it’s not just the timber that elegantly counteracts the more Brutalistic elements of this design. The cathedral height ceilings are accentuated by the articulation of fine, black aluminium glazing frames. The offices and meeting spaces look almost regal with their large sheets of expansive glass expressing the sheer size of the space. Its overall effect making it an office more akin to an art gallery than a boring farm of workstations.

But it’s the mishmash of the timber selections that gives the work areas a sense of Nordic playfulness. Recycled timber, plywood, MDF and hardwood panels make up a patchwork of finishes. Even the doors disappear into the patterned frontage of their archive and technical rooms, interestingly designed to look like large bespoke furniture boxes.

But in the end it is a travel company. Which means brochures. A library of them to be precise. Which means storage. And frankly, there is very little that is sexy about storage. And yet this fit out manages to make it so, incorporating storage as part of its nod to Scandinavian design. And therein lies the beauty of this space, an ingenious design that follows both beautiful form and practical function.