Fred Pawle |
March 25, 2009
Article from: The
Australian
Only a week after leaving a large company and setting up his own interior design business on his dining table at home, Matthew Sheargold, 35, was invited to pitch for a major contract: Red Bull's new offices in Alexandria, Sydney.
Matthew Sheargold's design for Red Bull included an indoor "grassy hill" for informal meetings.
Sheargold won the contract last March, and recruited an old student friend and former colleague, Sally Hieatt, to help out. The pair moved into a studio, and got to work. Time was limited. The office was still being built, and Red Bull wanted to move in by November.
Sheargold made the deadline, and the project is now on the short list for the Interior Design Awards 09, which will be announced in Melbourne on May 1.
After hearing presentations from management about the company's culture, and conducting extensive surveys of the staff himself, Sheargold boldly proposed reducing Red Bull's proportion of private offices to 10 per cent, and 90 per cent open plan. At the time, the office ratio was half and half, a reflection of the company's conventional corporate style, which emanated from head office in Austria. The client was hesitant, but Sheargold persisted. Eventually, a compromise of a 30-70 split was agreed upon.
Sheargold's concept is based on a village. There is a central library, bar, town hall, park, basketball court, rooftop bar, cricket pitch and even a grassy hill where informal meetings can be conducted.
What, no swimming pool? "Don't laugh!" he says. "We did toy with that idea at one stage."
The various of environments cater for all of Red Bull's wide range of employees, from directors to the young drivers of promotional Minis, who occasionally spend time at headquarters too. "We've given them a multitude of environments - meeting ares, quiet ares, whatever you like, to enable them to bring out the best in all their people at different times."
Sheargold says designers can sometimes take their eye off the ball when tackling big jobs. "Some designs can be so hard and designed," he says. "I've worked on projects like that, and you get caught up in creating clean lines. But it's all about people. This (Red Bull) job is not cutting edge in that it's got immaculate detailing, but it's about where people live and think and work. It's a human design."
Residential designer Juliette Arent, 32, who also made the awards short list, says there is a trend among residential designers to create generic looks.
"We wanted to inject some life and personality in designs," she says. "The home is such an important space, and we encourage people to make it personal, not look so minimal."
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Arent and her partner, Sarah-Jane Pyke, do this by subtly inverting the client-designer relationship. Instead of dictating the design, they ask the family what they want. Kids especially are given a chance to contribute to the design.
"Most of our clients like the way we don't dictate," she says. "We try to offer solutions that are stylish and timeless and all those things, but also feel personal to the client. Otherwise they could just be walking into a showroom when they walk into their own house."
