The home of design

Over the last few months we’ve been spending a lot of time in trendy Fitzrovia and dodging tourists on Oxford Street, all in the name of design of course. We were invited back to Derwent London to work on the marketing materials for their property Holden House, a Grade II listed building whose office entrance is nestled on Rathbone Place, for its up and coming return to the market.

Each unit could be taken as a whole or split down to provide multiple spaces, spanning across floors if required. We needed to ensure the marketing materials showed the flexibility of the space, as well as selling the spaces and the building itself.

When we viewed the building’s floor plans, the shapes of each unit, and the way they could overlap to create new units, caught our attention and formed the basis of the final concept. We used these irregular shapes to create intersecting forms that shift and play with empty space.

We designed a quirky brochure, featuring die cut coloured stock, where the shapes overlap and reveal imagery and text as you read, evoking the sense of discovery that can be felt when walking through the building itself.

The website takes the idea of a traditional longform site and turns it on its head (well, its side to be precise!). As you scroll, the shapes shift and roll over one another. Continue scrolling and images are revealed as you explore the site. Some clever coding from our Head of Digital, James, means that each section of the site has a unique URL. As the site has no traditional pages it was important to create a way users could share or bookmark key areas such as the map or contact page.

The property flew off the shelves like hot cakes and is now fully let, and sadly no longer requiring the promotional website. Don’t worry though! The site lives on and you can still view the quirky side scrolling design on our demo site here.

Next step is to install the wayfinding for the building, which also follows the irregular shape theme, and will help ensure the new tenants, and their guests, can find their way around the labyrinth of Holden House, so watch this space.