Cheil Hong Kong Office | Bean Buro

Bean Buro designed the new office space for creative company Cheil, which comprises over three floors in an office building in Sheung Wan. The workspace has a total area of approximately 25,000 square feet to accommodate the newly expanded in-house departments, creating a large holistic office for the company’s Hong Kong branch.

The design challenge was to create a generous studio-like workspace to reflect the company’s creative culture, allowing cross-departmental staff to feel connected with each other and promote interactions within the company, as well as interactions with external partners and clients. The new workspace successfully branches off from the old-fashioned, corporately-strict space, into a more relaxed atmosphere that encourages creativity.

The priority was to design generous spaces for the staff where they could feel comfortably at home and creatively encouraged. Staff can gather for cozy idea discussions at various informal meeting places; a lounge with a fireplace, a casual cafe, or in the custom-made diner booths. Staff is encouraged to personalize their environment and populate the walls and columns with artwork, subsequently creating a playful dialogue with the renowned arts and crafts district of Sheung Wan.

A continuous ribbon-like joinery system encourages creative ideas that move around the floor space. The new workspace rejects the former offices’ dated cellular cubicle design, to embrace a fresh open plan studio space, with long desk clusters forming the open plan areas, and private offices and meeting rooms located around the perimeter. The design creates a variety of private, semi-private, and shared spaces.

This ribbon-like system links all of the departments together with shared surfaces to encourage collaborations. It also provides for a variety of functions such as low storage shelving, in-wall seats for informal meetings and shared work surfaces that undulate between desktop and bar heights. Spawning from this ribbon are the fingers of desk clusters, which mutate to full-height bookshelves at one end. The overall effect is a holistic feeling of interconnectedness.

While private offices and meeting rooms are located around the perimeter of the floor space for private conversations, their walls are translucent and create a non-hierarchical atmosphere. Soft and playful semi-transparent graphics are applied to the full-height glass walls to provide signage and create visual privacy.

The lighting design is cozy and comfortable to create a home-like atmosphere. Gallery-style spotlights highlight the artwork on the walls, while staff can enjoy meeting around the pendant lights in the ribbon joinery system.

The material palette for the design feels collegiate, informal, and relaxed. Joinery elements are made of environmentally-friendly recycled chipboard. Seating upholstery and felt curtains provide acoustic and textural softness, while wall surfaces made in blackboard glass allow ideas to be scribbled during formal and informal discussions.

A set of curving conference tables has been artfully designed to break down the strict atmosphere of a traditional corporate conference room. These tables can be playfully rearranged into four configurations to adapt to different functions, from one long arrangement for large-scale meetings, to smaller clusters for small-scale meetings — a reminder of a constant transitional state as the key to creativity.