Anders Berensson Architects together with Wallensteen & Co have designed the new Stockholm office for Nordic licensing company Rights & Brands. The interior design focus on creating a functional work space as well as displaying the company’s classic Scandinavian brands, through custom made cabinets and murals cnc-milled, printed or painted onto the interior of the space.
The program is divided into two parts. An office part with workspaces, telephone rooms, storage and printers that is located at the quite part furthest from the entrance. These functions takes up half the space and have a calm and strict functional design in soft colors and Scandinavian materials. The floors are made of industrial ash wood parquet and limestone from the Swedish island Gotland. The interiors are in soft colors and pine tree.
The second more public part includes the entrance, conference rooms, kitchens and toilets and is designed in the same fashion but with more representative and social functions. This part is designed with custom made furniture’s displaying the company’s brands. Since many brands are Scandinavian icons we focused on creating a design that rather refers to how a museum would show its collections than how a typical store or office would show its products. We therefore decided to frame a smaller amount of high quality items in cabinets and on pedestals instead of making packed shelf showing a lot. The displayed items changes over time or depending on event or visitors. All items have its own space in frames or on a pedestal to be shown as a standalone piece of art. All custom-made interior is made in pine tree to give the items a Scandinavian backdrop. Most design brands stars like and art project rather than a business. To highlight this we chosen to incorporate some of the fine graphic art into the built. Some classic graphics has become cut out silhouettes functioning as handles in hatches, other patterns has been enlarged into cnc-milled murals or scaled up paintings zooming into the enormous craft of one single piece of art.
The entrance area is a museum space with a cabinet covering the whole entrance wall. The cabinet includes most brands. The cabinet is covered with changeable hatches to fit several scenarios. When a specific event is taken place a specific type of items can be displayed. Every hatch has a milled hole that is both a handle but also silhouette of its content. So when the hatch is closed it’s a small reminder of the product hidden behind the hatch. The entrance area also have a waiting area with an exhibition on pedestals showing rarities and design icons.
When going through the central corridor you walk along custom made cabinets that is a mix of lockers, library and glass cabinets for displaying products. At the other end of the corridor is an up scaled up wallpaper motive from the Tove Jansson illustration the tough journey.
The kitchen and lounge area is mostly designed for spontaneous meetings. The custom made furniture are designed for more social functions. At the facade runs a long bench that shifts from being a sitting area to a workbench. At the lounge area is a library of design and illustrator books. The coffee bar has another Tove jansson drawing of a forest scaled up, digitalized and CNC milled into the pine wood wall.
Entering the biggest conference room the design goes from a light Nordic design to a black colored corporate busyness room. A big round black table sits in the middle of the room surrounded by black chairs. A black communication wall is built as black whiteboard with an inbuilt tv and camera set for video meetings.
