Warm timber in battens and screens, glass with screen-printed vinyls, the brand’s red on a few specific pieces and a vertical garden at reception. That is how a warehouse unit in the Guadalhorce Industrial Park, Málaga, became the headquarters of a technology company: 544.76 m², with one open-plan area for 50 desks, another for 18, two meeting rooms and four booths. Underneath the brief lay an unglamorous problem: noise, and how to get rid of it without closing the floor plan back up.
The brief: three plan options and five changes
The existing layout was that of a company from another era: a training room, an archive, a boardroom, a kitchen and a row of cellular offices. The client, a Málaga firm working in software development, technology outsourcing and IT services, had long since stopped working that way. In May 2022 we drew three plan options and put them on the table before committing to anything.
On 18 May five written changes came back: lose the combined changing room and store, move the second meeting room to the far end, drop two large rooms, enlarge the booths beside the canteen and give administration more space. All five went in. The layout was signed off on 6 June: 148.37 m² of open plan for 50 desks (2.97 m² per desk), a further 57.84 m² for 18 more, 116.54 m² of break-out space, two meeting rooms of 21.90 and 17.66 m², four booths, a director’s office, administration, a 12-seat canteen and a server room. In a competition such as the one for the Teatinos secondary school, the brief comes ready-made; here it was written jointly with the people who would be using the space.
What the photos don’t show: acoustics, raised floor and data
In an open-plan office the weak point is rarely the partition itself. It is the plenum above it. Build the wall perfectly and the meeting-room conversation still travels over the top, through the suspended ceiling. So the dividing wall is a multi-layer metal-stud plasterboard partition, (13+13+70+13+13)/600, 120 mm thick, four boards, Q2 finish, with an acoustic isolation strip. And that is why 468.82 m² of DP8 2AluR acoustic barrier by Knauf Insulation — rigid mineral wool panels, 1000x600x80 mm, aluminium-faced on both sides — was carried across the plenum.
The demountable ceiling was taken down and reinstalled, reusing the boards, with mineral wool laid over the top. Below, the existing raised floor was used to run two separate 200×60 basket trays, one for power and one for data, with floor boxes set into the floor itself and UTP Cat6A cabling. Above, 600×600 LED panels, 42 W, 4000 K, with an opal diffuser. It is the same discipline we apply to chains of commercial premises such as the Synergym gym network, seven centres in all: whatever cannot be touched later is settled before anyone moves in.
Materials, brand and three rounds of interior design
The interior design was done in-house, in three deliveries — 27 June, 4 July and 8 July 2022 — looking for the middle ground between brand identity and a place where people spend eight hours a day. Warm timber in battens and screens, glass with screen-printed vinyls, the company reds on furniture and a few specific pieces, and real planting: a vertical garden at reception and a suspended planter over the open-plan area. The same attention to detail we bring to interiors of a different scale, such as MOSS.
April to August
Appointment on 22 April 2022, measured survey on 11 May, construction project dated 8 July. Three months. The basic design went out to the air-conditioning contractor on 8 June, before the construction project was finalised, so that the services contractors could bid in parallel with the design development: air conditioning and ventilation on one side — inverter cassettes, a dedicated split unit for the server room and extraction — and power, data network and CCTV on the other. The building work was a single package covering partitions, suspended ceilings, insulation, plumbing and builder’s work in connection with services.
Not everything worked first time. In August the ceilings and the partition insulation had to be re-measured, with a schedule of new items. There was no structural work: everything went into partitions, ceilings, insulation and services. There was a visit to the unit on 10 June to resolve the air conditioning and electrics, and a site visit on 23 August with the works under way — the same close follow-up we give to interventions in existing buildings such as La Equitativa.
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Project data
- Typology: Commercial (tertiary) · interior renovation and interior design of an industrial unit as corporate headquarters
- Use: Offices · technology workplace
- Location: Guadalhorce Industrial Park, Málaga
- Design year: 2022 · concept design in May, construction project in July
- Construction year: 2022
- Status: Built
- Built area: 544.76 m² (measured on site)
- Client: Private Málaga technology company (software and IT services)
- Construction monitoring: Klic Arquitectos · site visits recorded on 10 June and 23 August 2022
- MEP engineering: Power, Cat6A data and CCTV: NTIC (Málaga) · Air conditioning and ventilation: Novaire 2020 SL (Málaga)
- Interior design: Klic Arquitectos
- Photography: Fernando Gómez Mateos · @loveladrillo
- Klic services: Concept design, basic design, construction project, interior design and construction monitoring
- Team: Juan A. Goñi Uriarte (COA Málaga reg. no. 1206) and Ruth Buján Varela (COA Málaga reg. no. 1333)
