When Australia's foremost creative event services company set out to build a new headquarters, a standard office fit-out was never a serious consideration. Harry The Hirer produces large-scale events, conferences, exhibitions and bespoke productions for clients who expect spectacle. Their workspace needed to meet the same standard.
Delivered in collaboration with design partner RCA Studio, the project is housed within a heritage building more than a century old, a constraint that shaped the entire design approach. Rather than working against the building's existing character, the project threads contemporary technology and custom fabrication through its historic fabric, letting the contrast do much of the work.
That fabrication is extensive. Nearly everything in the build is custom-made, including 3km of LED spaghetti lighting woven across multiple floors and a curated arrangement of LED screens running digital art throughout the space. Together they form a programmable, building-wide light environment that animates the interior and shifts the atmosphere across the course of a day.
The ground floor establishes the project's intent immediately, presenting visitors with a series of configured event setups that demonstrate Harry The Hirer's breadth of capability. From there, the journey moves upward through a breakout level enclosed by full-height LED walls and a ceiling displaying fluid, aquatic moving imagery, an environment that reads more like an installation than a workplace.
Connecting the levels is a multi-storey atrium, created through structural cut-outs in each floor plate, and anchored by a glass LED screen spanning from ground to third floor - the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. A feature staircase with intersecting flights rises through the void, drawing light from roof skylights downward through perforated metal balustrades that break and distribute both natural and coloured light across all levels.
The technical demands of the project were considerable. Structural intervention, heritage sensitivities, custom fabrication at scale and a design programme that continued to evolve through construction all required close coordination and disciplined problem-solving to keep delivery on track.
The finished headquarters is a precise expression of what Harry The Hirer does - and a persuasive argument for how far workplace design can reach when the client refuses to set a ceiling.
