The office of W+K, an advertising agency in New Delhi, is ‘open’ for business.
A casual visitor to the DDA commercial complex in Sheikh Sarai, a south Delhi neighbourhood, could be forgiven for wanting to beat a hasty retreat. The area is a confusing collage of shops, eateries, services, banks, but take the short flight of stairs down from the Punjab National Bank and turn left, and the offices of advertising agency Weiden + Kennedy (W+K) are revealed as a hitherto well-kept secret
The office has three discreet work areas, connected together by a public corridor, to the left of which is the principal work area. Another, smaller work area with a meeting room attached is on the right, and down the passage, past the MTNL office on the right, is a second meeting space, and further on, the restrooms and cafeteria. A patch of well-manicured grass with shady trees and leafy shrubs abuts all three spaces. This is clearly a focal point, and the interiors have been designed to make the most of its cheeriness.
Outside inside
“Extend what is outside to the inside”, was the brief given by V Sunil, partner at W+K Delhi, to Saurabh Dakhshini, who designed the interiors. Interestingly, this is only the second project for this young architect, a post-graduate of The Bartlett at the University College of London.
Sunil was clear that he didn’t want the usual plush office. “I wanted something that was comfortable, and had a certain energy everywhere,” he says. “ Conventional, but not too conventional,” Dakshini adds.
The two spent about six months looking for space, and even zeroed in on an old industrial shed — “but we didn’t get permissions” — before finalising this site in December 2008. “It used to be a banquet hall,” Dakshini says, “a very functional kind of space. We were very conscious of this context and didn’t want a design that made the other offices in the vicinity look like an installation.”
The thing that strikes one immediately about the office is its openness. Floor to ceiling clear glass panels do duty as walls along the length of garden and corridor, exposing the entire work area to the world, as it were. “Openness was part of the brief,” says Dakshini, “and it was difficult to achieve because in an advertising agency you need areas that are private and secure.”
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Quirky ideas
Dakshini managed the task using clever, simple ploys. The computers in the creative department, for one, all face away from the passage. “I didn’t have an option, Dakshini clarifies, “since natural light is bad for the screens.”
Glass squares affixed to the outer wall serve to partly conceal the copywriters working just behind. These also serve as a storyboard for the exhibition currently on at W+K Exp, an adjoining gallery and one of the USPs of the W+K office. They serve another function as well — on the reverse is the ‘Employee Board’, a feature of W+K offices worldwide, with headcuts of all the people working there. Only these are not photographs but paintings done by a traditional Rajasthani muralist from Jaipur.
It’s quirky little touches such as these that make up the unique character of this office. The showpiece is the “pencil wall” behind the reception area. Devised by senior creative Hanif Kureishi, it has 30,000 specially imported pencils stuck point down at equal distances into soft board, grey-blue pencils for the background and yellow to make the words, Work is Worship — an Indian take on the W+K work ethic, Work comes first.
There’s another maxim, ‘Fail harder’, that adorns the wall in the room where the creative department sits, this one written in little circles brightly painted yellow, orange, red, green, blue...
The ‘kissing booths’ are open cubicles that serve not just as informal meeting rooms but also to divide the space. These are straight backed cushioned bench-seats in the same dull grey that predominates most of the office, with a barely-perceptible heart-shaped sticker in opaque grey on the glass.
The colour grey
Grey is an overriding, but not overwhelming, element, not just in the colour palette, but also in the sense of ‘neutral’, ‘dull’. The walls are painted grey, the ceilings are encased in hard-board, the floors in cement board and the furniture is made of industrial board with some bits in unpolished red timber. It’s deliberate, of course — “These are creative people; there’s too much colour in their lives,” Dakshini laughs.
So he gave the office a ‘fairly neutral’ framework, using Madras check upholstery fabric and a few bits of embroidery here and there to add accents of colour. As it turned out, the sombre colours have one other advantage — they imbue the space with a sobriety that takes the edge off the bright sunlight that comes in through the glass expanses for most of the day.
The only splash of colour is in the break-out area, which has a large television and shelves piled high with books and on the floor, cushioned mats and triangular cushions in dark green and purple — Wimbledon colours — where you can sit back comfortably, or even doze off.
“I wanted to be as sensitive to material and spaces as I could. That meant being conscious of not wasting anything. And little things like using no enamels in the colours.”
Some pieces of furniture, such as Sunil’s desk and the red rocking horse in the reception area, were picked up from Sharma Farms, a storehouse of second-hand furniture in Delhi.
If Dakhshini doesn’t feel entirely comfortable using ‘green’ to describe his interior design it is because of the bench-seat in the reception — a solid piece of exposed timber, with contoured seats and backrests in carved wood, ordered specially for the project. But then wood ages and can always be recycled, Dakshini defends.
Yes it can. But how many architects and designers are similarly conscious about natural resources?