The refurbished building provides a completely up-to-date working environment for the GGF group of companies.

It was an opportunity for the GGF to exemplify the best use of glass and best practice in modern building refurbishment, as well as bring together the various individual companies that share the GGF umbrella.

The refurbished building was also an opportunity to provide additional facilities for the group, and in turn to help the GGF group companies develop their separate identities – something that, arguably, the old offices prevented them from doing.

Refurbishing the building with 'best practice' in mind involved putting the employees at the centre of design whilst ensuring that the building itself in a sustainable manner: how are the members of staff going to work, interact with one another, share knowledge?; what do they need from their working environment to enable them to do so?

These requirements had to balanced against the need to be sustainable, flexible and practical. The future of the GGF relies on the ability to be relevant to the needs of their members and to do so they need to be able to develop and adapt, and the refurbishment of the new Ayres Street offices had to encourage this and provide that fluidity. For example within the working environment team sizes need to be able to expand and contract to meet the changing requirements of different tasks and projects and so the office space provided has to be able to easily accommodate change.

To assist with this flexibility we recommended a workbench system, rather than individual desks. This way, a single team could quite easily work round one surface, and it allows the space afforded to individuals to be more generous overall. At the same time we have provided for individuality, in the form of privacy screens, filing and personal storage. All of this was ergonomically designed to meet the current standards.

We spent a lot of time talking to the different companies – GGF, BFRC, GGFi, FENSA and Borough IT – to find our how they interact, and how each of them would grow. This helped us to understand how they would best interact with the building. For instance, it became obvious that the best use for the ground floor would be to provide the outward face of the organization and to act as a social hub; which would house the reception, meeting rooms and a coffee bar that will overlook the garden to the rear.

We then distributed the companies over the other three floors, playing close attention to how the senior management interacts with their companies.

The original building is a 1970s warehouse constructed in an L-shape. It had a steel frame with concrete plank infill, with a 60mm screed topping. The building also had very poor thermal properties, with old steel windows and single glazing and no insulation on the various flat roofs. Despite this, the building was in good condition, and provided us with a good opportunity to develop a modern solution to our clients needs.

We started by removing the screed off the concrete plank structure, which provided a space to introduce a raised access floor without reducing the floor to ceiling heights. We replaced the screed with a shallow access floor. We used this to hide all the data cables, power cables and pipes etc. This means we don't have to deal with the clutter that modern offices can generate. It also gave us a great deal of flexibility when deciding how to arrange the workstations – access to data and power was as simple as lifting up a floor panel.

In addition the resulting reduction in the overall weight of the building allowed us to construct a fully glazed box as a new third floor without having to alter the existing foundations. The box is structurally glazed floor to ceiling so that views across London are completely uninterrupted. The high performance specification of the double glazed units has been designed to minimise heat loss and solar gain. The units are argon filled for improved performance.

We have changed the 'L' shape plan of the building to a 'C' shape, because a large portion of the existing floor plates overlooked a poor quality light well. By infilling this light well we have managed to gain a lot more space on each the other floors, and with the stairwell being located at the centre of the building, makes interaction between the different floors very straightforward.

Internally we have opened up the office floors as much as possible, using floor-to-ceiling glazing where possible, so that you have visibility through the office and, sometimes, beyond, over London. This openness encourages the notion of community, and enables everyone to be aware of what might be happening elsewhere within the organisation. This is a very modern approach to designing a working environment, and it fosters the idea of interaction and sharing knowledge.

The lighting and air-conditioning systems are also state of the art, which, in conjunction with the high levels of thermal insulation used throughout and the passive solar hot water collectors on the roof, help the building to pass Part L of the Building Regulations with flying colours. A passive control system monitors levels, and dims the lights if they are not needed, either because there is sufficient daylight being provided through the windows or if the spaces are left empty for any amount of time. A VRV Comfort Cooling system means that individual areas can be cooled or warmed as required without affecting other areas on a floor. Being responsible for the proper use of energy is something that everyone involved in the project, from the clients through the consultant team to the contractor, subcontractors and suppliers bought into. Needless to say, in this instance, it was a primary objective of the GGF from the outset.

This was a very exciting project to work on because we had a client who encouraged us to take a dated building and modernise it, using the very latest methods, to levels exceeding current standards, as an exemplar project. We've managed to significantly increased the floor area of the building and have incorporated a considerable amount of transparency through floor to ceiling glazing, whilst leaving the existing building structure largely intact. I'm really pleased with the outcome because although much of what we have done can be found in part in other buildings around the capital, I think with the new GGF headquarters we have managed to really push the envelope across a wide range of issues.