Warm timber in battens and screens, glass with screen-printed vinyls, the brand\u2019s red on a few specific pieces and a vertical garden at reception. That is how a warehouse unit in the Guadalhorce Industrial Park, M\u00e1laga, became the headquarters of a technology company: 544.76 m\u00b2, 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.<\/p>\n
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 M\u00e1laga 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.<\/p>\n
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 m\u00b2 of open plan for 50 desks (2.97 m\u00b2 per desk), a further 57.84 m\u00b2 for 18 more, 116.54 m\u00b2 of break-out space, two meeting rooms of 21.90 and 17.66 m\u00b2, four booths, a director\u2019s office, administration, a 12-seat canteen and a server room. In a competition such as the one for the Teatinos secondary school<\/a>, the brief comes ready-made; here it was written jointly with the people who would be using the space.<\/p>\n 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 m\u00b2 of DP8 2AluR acoustic barrier by Knauf Insulation \u2014 rigid mineral wool panels, 1000x600x80 mm, aluminium-faced on both sides \u2014 was carried across the plenum.<\/p>\n 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\u00d760 basket trays, one for power and one for data, with floor boxes set into the floor itself and UTP Cat6A cabling. Above, 600\u00d7600 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<\/a>, seven centres in all: whatever cannot be touched later is settled before anyone moves in.<\/p>\n The interior design was done in-house, in three deliveries \u2014 27 June, 4 July and 8 July 2022 \u2014 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 inverter cassettes, a dedicated split unit for the server room and extraction \u2014 and power, data network and CCTV on the other. The building work was a single package covering partitions, suspended ceilings, insulation, plumbing and builder\u2019s work in connection with services.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 the same close follow-up we give to interventions in existing buildings such as La Equitativa<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhat the photos don\u2019t show: acoustics, raised floor and data<\/h2>\n
Materials, brand and three rounds of interior design<\/h2>\n
April to August<\/h2>\n
Video<\/h2>\n