30 Clerkenwell Road, Hawkins\Brown

Project: 30 Clerkenwell Road
Award: Workspace Interiors - Corporate Offices (Under 2,000 SQM), 2024
Location: London, United Kingdom
Design Practice: Hawkins\Brown
Client: Hawkins\Brown

The new London home of architects and interior designers Hawkins\Brown is a test bed for the practice’s ideas on modern ways of working.  The practice has transformed the former Vitra showroom at 30 Clerkenwell Road into a new home for its 250 London staff, featuring flexible hub spaces for collaboration, modelmaking and sketching and a fully equipped model shop, alongside the more familiar work and touchdown spaces.

The 1,133 square metre studio, arranged over three floors of a 1970s building, places emphasis on creativity, flexibility, sustainability and wellbeing. The Canteen on the ground floor offers informal work and social areas for staff and guests and is easily configured for a variety of extra-curricular activities including community uses. The space can easily be divided into smaller, more private dining rooms by power assisted acoustic curtains, and it is available for community use outside of working hours.

Creative installations and ever-changing exhibitions create a dialogue with the surrounding community on the ground floor. The vast shopfront window graphics are designed by architect June Tong, the winning entry in an in-house competition. A series of colourful line drawn huts, they recall a Hawkins\Brown tradition of incorporating small buildings within larger ones on projects including the Gantry at Here East. 

Design highlights

The Wild, the studio’s lush green entrance foyer features the Hut, is clad in an artwork of block-printed planks by artist Richard Woods. On the lower ground floor there are flexible hub spaces for collaboration, modelmaking and sketching; equipped with ample pin up and mobile screens, they are also ideal for design reviews. Alongside is the fully equipped model workshop, open to all staff to use.

Fixtures and fittings are made from a palette of natural materials – cork, timber, and linoleum. Furnishings from the previous studio have been reused and recycled wherever possible while any new furniture is British made. 

Photo credit: Ruth Ward