A Stockholm office with counter by Note Design Studio
A Stockholm office with counter by Note Design Studio
When redesigning its office space, Swedish company Samsen knew what it didn't want - conventions - and what it wanted: a wine bar. In the design studio Note, it found an accomplice who met the task with lots of textiles, homely spatial solutions and inspiration from the Far East. The result: nobody wants to go home now.
by Tanja Pabelick, 19.01.2022
The future of the office? Could be the farewell of the office. Of course, we will continue to seek out second or third places to work. But the office is just on its way to opening up to other uses. The employees of the Swedish company Samsen recently took a particularly progressive approach to the idea of fluid functions. By transforming their desks into counters and bistro tables in the evening, they are bringing the end of the day right next to the keyboard.
Their creative Stockholm residence is nothing less than a wine bar that draws its aesthetic inspiration from Japanese living rooms. The office is a secondary matter here. "Samsen first had to explain to us that they didn't want an office at all. They just wanted to work in a wine bar," reports Susanna Wåhlin of Note Design Studio. She and her team redesigned the space of a former jewelry store in the city's Odenplan district for the tech consulting firm - incorporating lots of textiles, wood and warm colors into the flowing layout.
Instead of Hoffice into the Boffice: Bar meets office
Samsen usually seeks out his clients in their offices. And vice versa, the company's own offices have also served primarily representative or communicative purposes in the past. The employees met to exchange ideas rather than to work quietly and were always allowed to decide for themselves when they wanted to be at headquarters and when they wanted to be in the home office.
This social understanding of the workplace gave rise to the idea for a revolution when the company moved: the office was to become the perfect meeting place without further ado. For the founder of Samsen, who is a great wine lover, this could only be a wine bar. And so a theme was found that, according to the designers at Note, fitted in well with the manageable space. With seating ranging from a bar to a bistro table, different settings can be placed right next to each other. Stylistically, Japan served as inspiration, where the ubiquitous lack of space means that even tiny-looking rooms can accommodate many people.
Warmly staged
In terms of colors and materials, the East Asian references are evident in the choice of dark wood surfaces combined with cool tones and hard counterparts such as steel or concrete. Also typically Japanese are the furniture integrated into the architecture, such as the wall-filling wooden cabinets or the window sills converted into chaise longues. The yellow accents, on the other hand, were penned by Note and some were designed specifically for Samsen's wine bar. These include a sunny yellow shelf and the color-matched conference and communal table. Formal lightness is brought by the floating textile panels that fall to the floor in mustard yellow in front of the window or in stone gray halfway up the large passageways between the two zones of the room.
Cold set
With the large glass refrigerator, the interior obviously professes its bar theme; you have to look a little longer for the office features. One clue is the many power outlets that turn every seat into a digital-compatible workstation. And behind the wall-length gray curtain, Note has hidden a whiteboard and two large screens for presentations. "While 'normal' companies assume that the office establishes relationships within their team - and thus a corporate culture, many newer companies that want to be flexible struggle to create that sense of belonging. They often solve this with mandatory team-building activities like conferences and seminars. The Samsen studio is our vision of an alternative: we spend our time together voluntarily," says Tomas Måsviken, founder of Samsen, explaining his approach. So far, Note's innovative concept is working extremely convincingly. Even without a time clock and core working hours, the office is currently always well frequented - from "9 to 5" with the tablet as well as from "5 to 9" with the Tempranillo.
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