Ideas: Juliet Zulu Office Space
This is the first in a new series called “Ideas” where we look at commercial spaces that are packed full of good ideas for all of us who work at home. I was inspired after meeting with our West Coast A+D director, Richard Munsey to start researching some of his commercial contacts. There was a lot of great work which I will be sharing with you over the coming weeks.
This office, however, didn’t arrive through Richard. I came across this space yesterday on Design*Sponge (check out Grace’s Design*Sponge redesign – nice job!) It’s the Portland, Oregon office of Juliet Zulu - a creative agency run by brothers Zak Davis and Jayson Bostedor. The agency name derives from the military call signs for J and Z (Jayson and Zak).
The concrete floor is a painted stark black. “We did a very light sanding and texturing, to better hold the paint, of the concrete floor and then applied Miller’s semi-gloss concrete stain/paint,” says Zak. Three Eames Molded Plastic Chairs line a simple Oregon fir desk and an Eames Compact Sofa in Pendelton wool sits against a particle board wall that conceals a meeting place.
“The wood in the desk is Oregon fir, reclaimed from a 120 year old Oregon barn, milled and stained. Dimensions are 18 feet long x 1 3/4 feet deep.” They chose wire bases for the Eames Molded Plastic Chairs. What inspired that choice? “Well, Madmen of course. No, I wanted something white and chrome to stand stark against the dark floors and to match the chrome/white of the Apple equipment along the long table. I also love all things MCM.”
They used restaurant hooks to hang headphones. “They are awesome. Made to be a portable purse hook for when sitting at a restaurant, they are the Philippi Hook, designed by Philippi Design Germany. We found them locally at Canoe, they’re $18 each.” And instead of a bulletin board papers are attached to clipboards and hung on the wall.
If you work somewhere interesting and would like us to consider it for Lifework please email me 3 or 4 images to cerentha_harris@hermanmiller.com
This office design is great… if everyone’s all lovey-dovey and doesn’t care about privacy at all and doesn’t have long legs or a bad back. Oh, and if they have lots of stand-up cocktail parties or, say, Viennese balls.
To my thinking, this kind of “one big happy family” office design is so self-limiting with regard to type of worker who can be accommodated that I would never want to design an office like this, beautiful though it appears to be at first blush.