Touch Digital by Post-Office
Herringbone parquet covers the walls and floor of this photography studio in east London by local design practice Post-Office.
Partitions around retouching booths contain vertical slats covered in grey felt to provide a colour-neutral background for viewing images on a computer screen and dampen the noise from the open workspaces.
The slats are finished in light wood on the side facing the communal areas and can be swivelled to control the levels of light in the booths.
Dark furniture in the reception and communal areas stands out against the wood.
We've also featured herringbone parquet on the floor of a Parisian boutique, the walls and ceiling of a personal shopping suite in London and seats in a Zurich cafe.
Post-Office is lead by designer Philippe Malouin and you can see more of his work plus interviews we've filmed with him here.
Photographs are by David Giles.
Here's some text from the designers:
Touch Digital offices, Shoreditch, London.
Post-Office was commissioned to design the new offices of Touch, London's leading fashion photographic service. Digital retouching agencies need a minimal amount of light in order to correctly visualise the computer screens. This constraint usually makes retouching studios a dark environment. We took this challenge to heart as we wanted communal areas of the new Touch offices to be bright and airy while providing low-light environments to facilitate the retouchers' work.
The new touch offices maximise the already generous amounts of space and light the warehouse had to offer. The space owes its aesthetic and choice of materials to Scandinavian classic modernism as well as 60s corporate American grandeur and the minimal art movement. The central retouching booths appear as minimal sculptures in a grand setting rather than individual work spaces. All of the retouching environments are lined in grey felt in order to offer a colour-neutral background for the retouchers while helping to noise-proof the open workspaces.