By Inside Design
Corner of Taranaki and Wakefield Street - Wellington, NZ
We designed the building you see here for our developer client. Xero had been secured as a tenant and our task was to create a new building to accommodate them utilising an existing two storey heritage building as the base. Whilst the fitout design was handled by others, we had a role to modify the interior base building to reflect their requirements. The collaboration to achieve this resulted in some great solutions - re-purposing floor joists as cladding to a central stair/atrium.
Our design philosophy is to mirror the bulk and form of the heritage Manthel Building with a simplified reflection above. We’ve designed a screen of semi-transparent mesh that covers most of the upper building. This material is held off the face of the main building and creates a layer that is opaque from the outside in bright sunlight and becomes almost transparent at night. It’s a sunscreen around the outside. Window boxes provide dedicated meeting and gathering spaces with a direct connection with the street. There’s three of these – two along Wakefield street and one above the entrance on Taranaki Street. The development provides five large open floor plates with daylight on three sides.
Inside is a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Wellington and Christchurch.
We call ourselves Inside because that’s our focus – how a space works for the occupants. When our scope extends to the outside, we wrap these spaces with simple, elegant architectural forms.
We are approachable. We’re not precious and we like to work with our clients rather than for them.