&Open Sep 22, 2019
We wanted a place that would fill with light; that would fuel what we hoped would be days of endless creativity and collaboration.
Our office (fondly referred to as "the studio") took some time to find. As our team grew, we necessitated a larger space with room for creatives and technologists, logisticians and a busy retail unit. Now, it houses 25 &Openers during the workday, a dog or two occasionally and a large assortment of house plants.
All images by Doreen Kilfeather
Light creates ambience and feel of a place, as well as the expression of a structure.
Le Corbusier
After a concerted real estate forage, we found the place. Hatched away in Dublin's Harold's Cross, just close enough to the city centre, just far away enough to be tranquil. It's not often we hear anything outside the windows but our neighbouring trees, birdsong or the sound of distant cars passing, (seriously), apart from Friday at midday, when the wail of an army siren can be heard from Cathal Brugha Barracks down the road.
Once we got in we stripped the floors, and restored what we could to its earliest state. Before we arrived, the building had housed an array of businesses (once a textile house for the county's school uniforms), and so lended itself to the broad strokes of work we do here at &Open.
We filled the space with cork tables and wooden screens; adorned every shelf with plants and gifts and books; lined the walls with moodboards, and crowded the nooks with our favourite stools from old Makers&Brothers collections.
As the team grows, the office reconfigures. Tables shift from one side of the room to the other, taking care not to disturb some of our longer-standing plants that now creep along the ceiling (aided in their longevity by our CEO/watering man, Jonathan). Where there once was shelf space, an assortment of objects for various clients now cluster; new gifts, made to last. Older side tables and accessories are brought downstairs, repurposed, to clear walkways and make room. Monthly magazines become fewer, making way for annuals, and migrate to the front of the office for visitors' perusal. And slowly but surely the space becomes a little louder, a little more crowded and a lot more our own.
We've a thing for stools