After more than a decade in Zagreb’s Zavrtnica within the award-winning office space that we had jointly designed and shared with the Bruketa&Žinić&Grey agency, we have moved to a new shopping centre environment in the heart of Zagreb. Since we specialize in office and stores design, the idea to have new office spaces set as a hybrid of a store and workspace was a natural fit.

Fortunately, during the construction works of the new Centar Kaptol we had designed, we “discovered” a space that had been used as a storage room for years. Behind a pile of construction materials, we recognized the potential of a space submerged in the surrounding nature with a spacious terrace and a lot of natural light, which after a short refurbishment became our new home.

In front of the workspace there is an experimental showroom, a testing ground for new design solutions, lighting, materials, etc., but also a space for collaboration between Brigada and the visiting creatives. The showroom is actually a showcase towards the public space of the Centar Kaptol, and we will change the setup periodically, providing our clients, as well as visitors to the centre, always with new contents.

In order to get to the office space, it is necessary to go through the showroom, take courage and press a large red button on the wall that activates the school bell in the office and one of the Brigada’s staff will open the secret door. The only indication of what is hidden behind the secret door is a porthole through which one can sneak a peek into the agency’s working atmosphere.

The working part of the office is dominated by a large glass wall covering almost half of the wall surfaces of the entire office, which opens towards the terrace and the park with trees, which thus become an integral part of the interior. In addition to the workstations that are divided by acoustic partitions, an essential element in the space is a large library with patterns, professional literature, and panels for mood boards and the elaboration of design processes.

The last area at the end of this linearly designed interior includes a kitchen and a dining room that open towards the terrace, which often becomes an alternative workspace in the Japanese cherries’ shade, but also a summer dining room and an urban garden where organic strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, salad, and various herbs are grown.

The office is primarily designed to be fully functional and to respond to the needs identified by the whole team in a series of workshops as key to a more comfortable and productive working environment. Designer furniture pieces include a dining table made of recycled wood from Tuscan villas, and original pieces of regional design classics such as Bernardo Bernardi and Niko Kralj’s armchairs, or Meblo luminaries from the 1970s. In order to give the design classics a suitable ambience, part of the showroom was transformed into a kind of homage to that time and was fully designed in the spirit of the 1970s and the former country. By combining the original designer furniture from that time and the custom tray table and the chest of drawers designed by Brigada’s product designers, and with the sound of records from a wooden record player, less formal meetings are being held or simply it is how a working day ends with a view of the park.