Home front Who else but a design practice called Odd could create an office for the equally mad brand consultancy Naked? The finished project is frighteningly kitsch, containing enough tat to do your gran proud, says Bethan Ryder
Entering the Naked office is an Odd experience, the reception resembles a granny flat lounge with a three-piece suite form Courts, netting, fireplace and a curled up moggie. One meeting room (aka the Trophy Room) resembles a dining room decked out with Naked numerous Campaign and Media Week awards, plus bespoke trophies awarded for excellence in other areas, baring plaques entitled Fairplay Kerplunck, Hari Kreshna After lifetime Achievment and Under 12’s cockfighting.
A second meeting/breakout room features assorted clocks displaying the time zones of obscure (but real) global destination: Big Bounce, Homo, Nobber and Monkey’s Eyebrow. A large area masquerades as a garden complete with fake strip mown grass, a huge picnic table and a patio guarded by a pair of giant begging topiary dogs. The garden is where the designers behind this kitsch, make-yourself-at-home office interior reside, ensconced in an area just behind the brick built mobile barbecue which houses DJ decks, naturally.
Odd comprises a trio of talented, forward thinking creatives. RCA architecture and interiors graduates Jonathan Mangham and Nick Stickland and St Martins industrial design graduate Simon Glover. The threesome cannily designed themselves into the same office as their client, Naked, which inhabits most of the space. Naked is a young pioneering multi-award-winning strategic thinking and communications agency, which boasts such clients as PlayStation, Honda, Reebok and Heineken.
Although Naked and Odd are separate companies, their services are complementary, they often collaborate on projects and they are both working with ad agency WRCS on the 118 The Number campaign. Naked played a major role in the strategy and concept, and Odd designed various aspects of the campaign, most notably the ice-cream van. Whereas Naked deals in strategic thinking for brands and companies, Odd is a multidisciplinary design consultancy. Odd works across the spectrum producing everything from architecture (bars in Tel Aviv and the Alps to private residencies in London) through to advertising and brand physicality for companies like Siemens Xelibri (a soundproof mobile phone pod) and Play Station.
Stickland says refurbishing Naked’s Clerkenwell office in London was ‘about creating a physical presence for Naked and taking the website and identity into reality. It’s a reflection of its personality as a company and its important for companies to be brave enough to do that.’
The idea for creating the quirky home-from-home was inspired by Naked’s website, www.nakedcomms.com, which is organised around the notion of the home. Stickland recalls the brief with fondness. ‘It was seriously one of the best architectural briefs I’ve had, slightly shit with a slightly shit budget (less than £40,000), and the outcome is pleasantly bad. Its quite a fine line between really bad and bad when you’re trying to prescribe crap, Kitsch is quite a tough thing to achieve but I think we’ve just about got there.’ Gazing around at corporate chairs disguised by Cat Kidston and Barbie fabric thee stone cladding and shed wall along one side concealing cupboards complete with mannequin dummy hands for doorknobs reminiscent of Chapman brother’s weirdness, I’ll have to agree. Odd has effectively subverted the whole notion of the office and the result is quite unnervingly David Lynchian. Mangham says ‘We thought “how can you take items with real office iconicity like a standard office chair, and cross-programme that with a Cath Kidston fabric or make a giant picnic table work as a desk?” It was about taking something everyday and changing it.’ It was about turning something quite dry into something quite rich while allowing the office to live and breath while the renovations were going on, ‘ continues Stickland. The reception itself was transformed over a weekend and the project is always evolving. For example, beds are planned for the main office area so that the Naked team can recline while it thinks.
The refurbishment was essentially cosmetic. ‘Originally it was a very corporate office with blue carpet tiles, white walls and MDF desks, a bit of exposed brick,’ says Mangham. ‘We looked at any surface that we could treat to eradicate that normal, corporate slickness, be that wall papering, stone cladding or applying plastic ivy.’ The majority of the project was spent sourcing – that’s shopping to you and me – with Odd scouring Snooper’s Paradise in Brighton in particular for ‘genuine granny stuff’. It is especially proud of its dog plate collection, each featuring a portrait fo a different breed, and the fireplace on wheels which conceals storage cupboards while also allowing easy access to it.
Despite and old-school approach to DIY, Odd is far from traditionalist, indeed to offer such a breadth of services is unique. One of its foremost skills seems to be demonstrating complex, intangible concepts in a simple, visual and entertaining way, this is something it wishes to develop further in its work for brands. The most intriguing example of its innovative, leftfield thinking is the way it actually markets itself. Reverting to the oldest trick in the book, Odd sells itself out of a suitcase. However this is no ordinary suitcase, it houses a model town called Oddville.
Odd was asked to present its company at an exhibition in New York, so a suitcase seemed the logical solution, its now it’s calling card. ‘It’s our business model,’ explains Mangham, instead of being a mission statement, its a physical model that packs down into a suitcase.’ Constructed by model-makes – Oddville, it has the Technicolor aura of a weird, middle-American town. Study it closely and there are zombies in the graveyard, a man stuck up a cow’s arse, and other oddities. It all sounds quite weird, and it really truly is.
As for the Naked office, it could be seen as part of a trend. As we yearn for the familiar in this age of uncertainty, the domestic aesthetic is filtering through into retail and commercial design, with new designer boutiques resembling exclusive homes and bars posing as boudoirs, but an office? Surely home and work are two diametrically opposed entities? Or maybe Odd’s interior reflects our manic 24/7 communication times. People either spend every waking hour in the office, or alternatively working from home. Perhaps Odd’s concept isn’t so odd after all then. Just remember, home is where the heart is….
Case Notes Village Suitcase Odd doesn’t pitch for jobs like your average design consultancy, instead it brings along a suitcase, in which can be found Oddville. “Signposts announce our two arms: experience (event, product and architecture) and identity (identity, graphics and guerrilla advertising). Six trucks containers embedded in the hills represent the three categories in each. Clients (disguised as cows) come from the trucks down to us in the church of Odd, then we draw on our resource filed of freelancers – or rather sheep – and then the cows get herded to the production silo and are eventually pushed out into the real world through The Truman Show-style staircase into the sky backdrop,’ explains Mangham. It all makes perfect sense.
Turf Love The grass is always greener especially when its supplied by Tiger Turf and installed by Sports and Leisure Turf. ‘It was quite fun calling up a company which is used to laying Tiger Turf for cricket and hockey pitches and running tracks and saying, “Erm, we’d like our Tiger Turf laid in two tone stripes in an office,” recalls Jonathon Mangham of Odd.
Glowing with pride The neon signs add an element of ‘kebab crapness’ to the whole place. Produced by S&N signs, one sits over reception announcing ‘Naked’ while another ‘Odd’, is suspended over Odd’s desks and others glow above the meeting room doors.
Strange request Odd also enjoyed making strange requests to the Silk Plant Company, which supplied the plastic ivy, but the most fun was asking for two topiary dogs and having to prescribe their position. Luckily the guy was well into it and created two begging dogs for Odd, although the T-Rex option was tempting.