Office Breakout Area and Coffee Bar – Harrogate
Harrogate, North Yorkshire
Bowman Riley designed a staff breakout area within the UK head office of a global designer and manufacturer of repair composite materials and industrial protective coatings in Harrogate.
Working in collaboration with Ultimate, we were tasked with transforming an unused mixture of offices, meeting rooms and a small breakout area into a space that would enhance staff wellbeing by encouraging regular breaks during the working day and facilitate collaborative working.
Our design proposal involved the removal of walls to create a large open plan breakout space that suits the needs of the company and its team. Steel bar partitions were used to break up the space and offer some visual height to the scheme. The breakout space comprises a large kitchen, various seating designs including cafe-style seating, high benches, a lounge area, a games room, a pool table and an area to work on personal projects.
Subsequently, the client identified an under stairs area of the building for transformation into space for informal meetings and refreshment breaks. The under-stairs area was designed as a coffee bar with a mixture of seating for a contemporary coffee shop vibe.
Our design needed to be cohesive to the main breakout space using a similar palette of colours, materials and textures. The addition of soft seating and cosy areas makes the stairwell space feel more intimate using rugs, lounge seating and patterned fabric to add warmth.
The layout of the space allows for quiet working along the workbench with task lighting using table lamps. A soft seating area in the centre creates a warm and inviting ambience designed to encourage communication between colleagues and informal meetings. Acoustic fins under the stairs and an abundance of soft furnishings help with the acoustic absorption in this area creating a relaxing and quiet space.
“We were approached by our client to turn two previously unused areas within their existing buildings, into social zones that promote employee collaboration. With this in mind, and
having worked with Bowman Riley on previous schemes, they were the obvious fit to bring this scheme to life”.
Mark Hickey, Ultimate
Please see more of our commercial office projects.