Style council

Two years ago, the London Borough of Ealing in west London decided to give itself an office space that would help it to boost its efficiency. About 2,500 members of staff from nine offices were to be collected into one building. But not just any old building. The council wanted to move away from the traditional local authority image – at best dated, at worst archaic – and give the impression of being a design-savvy client.

To do this, it hired architect Pringle Brandon, a specialist in office design, and set aside a budget of £18m. The brief was to take Perceval House, a 1982 building designed by Sidney Kaye Firmin and Partners, and strip out its interior. The old layout would be replaced by five storeys of offices above a customer service centre and business centre on the ground floor .

One of the first challenges was to effect this transformation while the 16,376m2 building was fully occupied. All the M&E services and structural cabling had to go, but they also had to remain live while they were being replaced. The team worked from the roof down to ensure minimum disruption to office workers, and the M&E and IT work took place in the evenings and weekends.

Perceval House is a forbidding, bulbous structure of red brick and opaque glass. A aim of the project was to make it more transparent and inviting from the outside. The entrance was moved from a side road to the main Uxbridge Road and landscaping was added to make it more welcoming. But once inside, the architect had to respond to two, apparently conflicting, demands.

Christopher Brandon, a partner in Pringle Brandon, says: “It was a complex design issue to make the ground floor open and inviting for visitors, who would feel that they could speak to someone quite openly, and at the same time have a separate area for the staff.”

The 39 ground floor reception desks are arranged in two oval-shaped spaces. Communication routes within this layout enable staff to circulate without entering the public area. “The aim was to segregate staff and public without the public noticing.”

Or, as project architect Kate Hopkins put it, they did not want to “cage the staff in front of the public”. To this end, high glazed partitioning panels were specified from manufacturer Nordwall to convey a sense of transparency.

To lighten up the drab atrium, Hopkins used tensile white fabric canopies that float from the ceiling from ceiling manufacturer Danogips. These were combined with bright colours on the walls and partitioning panels. Hopkins says all the surfaces on the ground floor had to be robust. A hardwearing white marble linoleum finish was chosen along with carpet for the public space flooring.

The look and feel of the facilities encourage staff to work in ways never seen before in local government

Richard Eastwood, director, Actium Consult

The office space on the floors above had a similarly ambitious remit. When the architect first arrived, it found a labyrinth of partitions. “The original building didn’t have a real structure,” says Brandon. “You’d go to a meeting and get lost in the maze of corridors.”

The architect’s solution was to create an open-plan office in which even the chief executive and the council’s corporate board would work. A palette of four colours – blue, green, orange and magenta – was specified to make navigation easier and help staff deal with the increased density.

In the true spirit of a branding agency, Pringle Brandon used colour-coded screen fabric, walls, signage and column casings in the four colours of the seasons to project the image of a sustainable council.

Hopkins said Pringle Brandon’s budget for the project was about one-third of what it usually gets from corporate clients, but she is convinced the local authority’s brand has been clearly imprinted in its new headquarters. The project team has vastly improved internal access at Perceval House.

“The look and feel of the facilities encourage staff to work in ways never seen before in local government,” says Richard Eastwood, director at programme and design manager Actium Consult.

“Now,” muses Brandon, “it will be interesting to see how the authorities will be able to express this in efficiently delivering services.”

Project team client London Borough of Ealing architect and interior designer Pringle Brandon programme and design manager Actium Consult structural, electrical, mechanical and structured cabling engineer Hurley Palmer Flatt main contractor Galliford Try Construction South cost consultant and project manager Davis Langdon