The Walls.
The walls of an office work too.
The Work Club office opened in 2007 in a South London hop warehouse, able to trace its history back 300 years. It was stuck in the 70s when we found it. Think of it as a scout hut, meets tech hub… with cheap rent.
We gutted the 4000sqft single room, added a really odd carpet, a nice big kitchen with a nice big dining table…
and put our logo up nice and BIG on the wall. So we couldn’t forget.
Although bootstrapped, we dropped a load into an office for >70 people for a business at the time <8. Back yourself. But also create the place you want to be, to attract the people to help you make it.
The space was good for work, and good for club. Good for giggs, after parties, pets and swordfights.
Up against one wall we put a bleacher. It cost $6000. Shipped over. Self assembly. Set up opposite a big screen. Great for company meetings, daytime 80s film binges, or just sitting up nice and high and looking down on people. We imagined it would also be great for client presentations, but it wasn’t.
Along the 22m blackboard wall Matt, Tom and Mathieu had the idea to write every single one of Bart’s lines, and went and made it happen with indefatigable illustrator Mat Williams and James Haworth of Hungryman.
So, it turns out writing fuck big on a wall causes no problems whatsoever for almost anyone, luxury clients included. DFIU was the then unwritten company motto, whispered quietly to others before important meetings, and we wondered if it could be written beautifully. Jack Hollands & Nick Garrett proved it could.
You can read about what DFIU really means here.
A few years later becoming Havas Work Club we moved into their Fitzrovia offices and did it again. Same brief, write the hard words nice, this time LA Ronayne commissioned Fanakapan’s amazing metallic graffiti balloons.
Back up a few years and back in our tech scout hut, we wrote A C L U B M A K E S F O R G O O D B U S I N E S Z above the bleacher. Club wasn’t just about being good to people, it was about being good for business.
In time we rebranded and refurbed, a bit. A new Work Club badge, with a nice space for HAVAS in it, and a new glass door. The door gave a tightly framed, noisy view into the space, so as you walked inside we wanted you to open up and look up. So we wrote HELLO on the roof.
Then we put this Murakami quote on the door handle, just to really let you know what you were walking into.
I’ve always been wary of company values, mostly because they tell you to be nice, energetic and smart. Stuff you should really just know and do already. But there’s value in telling people what a company expects, so we wrote some anti-values. And wrote them on the wall.
Read about the anti-values here.
The walls we didn’t write on, got written on anyway. Work in progress up everywhere. Yes, that’s a big snake.
So we created rooms that looped. Small spaces with continuous curved white walls to write on and a gap open enough to let curious people wander in, but closed enough to stay focused when inside.
It ran on. Off walls. Onto notebooks, all important new mug briefs and the bread/phone meeting bin. I particular liked the red duct tape trail all the way from the street to help important clients find us.
As said, as we joined Havas London in Fitzrovia so did the words… floor two welcomed you with part inspiration, part Eastwood threat and we gave the lifts an opinion of their own.
One meeting room we named Salford after Salford FC, which we rebranded, borrowing Anthony H Wilson’s great line, and Mooge hung a days-since-last-accident sign in the creative department.
This series of posters by Wavish went up in the cafe, based on Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, to inspire better writing.
And lastly we wrote the line from my D&AD manifesto on the front window.
In 2017 Havas moved into HKX. A first class, brand new 11 storey Havas Village power house right on Granary Square, Kings Cross. All agencies in together. Amazing potential. Amazing views. Amazing space. Very shiny and clean. Last week Wardy put up some very nice pigeons.
