Kitchener — Office

This was Flipwire Design's own office before the studio moved. Your own premises are the one job with no client to answer to, which makes them the right place to test an idea properly rather than talk somebody else into it. Almost everything here is two materials: one board and one slab.

The board is OSB — oriented strand board, the cheap structural sheathing that usually gets nailed up inside a wall and buried under plasterboard and paint. Here it is the finish. Walls, partitions, the corridor lining, the meeting room shelving and the pantry carcass are all the same sheet, sanded and sealed and nothing else. The difficulty with a material like this is the junctions: cut it carelessly and the place looks like a building site, so every edge is mitred, the sheets line through, and the shelves are let into the lining rather than hung off it. It costs a fraction of veneer and it is far less forgiving of bad setting out.

The reception counter is cast concrete, mitred at the corner so the slab folds as one plane with no change of thickness where it turns. Against the strand pattern of the board it does the work an entire palette usually does — one rough and warm, one smooth and cool, and nothing else required.

The pantry is black stone over the same board, lit from a slot behind the upper panel so the light grazes down the splashback instead of pointing at anyone standing there. Desks are a single timber worktop on a slim steel frame, long enough to seat the whole studio at once. The floor was left as screed. Nothing in the office was finished twice.