Clearbox

We sat down with John Megaughin, Managing Director of Clearbox, to talk about their newly designed office space in The Printworks on Belfast’s Queen Street. The project was a unique opportunity to blend historical character with modern functionality, and we were thrilled to collaborate with Clearbox on bringing their vision to life.

1. What was the inspiration behind your new office design?

The inspiration comes from our building. Our office is in the Printworks on Belfast’s Queen Street. The Printworks is a Victorian printing press that has been lovingly restored and converted into office space.

The exposed bricks, beams and pillars are more than 100 years old, and we wanted the character of the building to shine through as part of our fit out works.

We wanted to create a beautiful office space that used the character and personality of the building as the canvas for everything that we did.

The Alpha team did a fantastic job of using the building as a base to build on, creating a modern workspace that has many nods to the history of this amazing place.

2. What were your “must-haves” in your new office space?

We wanted a great kitchen, a large communal space instead of a boardroom and several breakout areas for meetings, brainstorms, chats and more.

We’re a very social, conversational team (to say the least…) and we wanted to create as many places within the space as possible to facilitate those conversations.

When we were designing our new space, we asked our team what they wanted. Gave them a blank sheet. What did they ask for? Two microwaves and a fridge freezer. That was it. They’re quite easily pleased on that front. Sometimes, anyway!

Oh, and we also wanted soundproof meeting rooms. We’ve never had those before. No more confidential calls in the car park for us…

3. Any no-gos?

We were open to all suggestions during the planning the process. The only thing we didn’t want was an office that looked like it could have belonged to anyone – we wanted the personality of the company to come through.

We’re always talking about how we’re ‘different’ as a company – not better than anyone else – just different. We wanted an office space that was different. Not like any, or many, other offices you’d see round here.

Denice and the design team delivered that in spades – we’re so, so happy with the result.

4. How does the new office space reflect your company’s culture/brand personality?

We are a very open and transparent agency. We’re a team of people who don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take what we do extremely seriously. The new office space reflects many of our values, including creativity, hard work, humility and care. We want to create an elite team and to do that, we need to give them an elite working environment. The expectations for what we wanted were sky high. The day we saw the finished office for the first time was wild – it exceeded our already lofty expectations by miles. Most of our team gasped when they saw the final product. It’s so nice!

But it just doesn’t look good – it performs well too. We have two soundproof meeting rooms. Two soundproof phone booths. A huge sofa and media wall area instead of a boardroom (there’s that ‘different’ thing again…) a kitchen we wish we could have in all our homes and loads of desk space. You couldn’t fail to be creative and work hard in an environment like this – it’s an inspiring and energising space.

5. What role does the office layout play in your day-to-day work? Did you have specific needs for different areas?

Our office is our home. Everything we do starts and ends here. We work together three days a week in the office, and we’ve always been big believers that people achieve bigger and better things when they’re together.

Our office gives us a place to connect, create and chat and to achieve all of these things, we need a modern, flexible, sustainable and comfortable place to work.

Whether it’s team presentations in our town hall sofa area, smaller group chats in a meeting room or two of us having a coffee at the kitchen island, we’ve worked with Alpha to create many different spaces within our office to help us do what we do best – deliver world class PR, social media and CSR campaigns for our brilliant clients.

The outdoor terrace has also been used for the odd prosecco Friday, when workload and weather permits.

What’s not to love?