More than half our old furniture is now in our new office, and it cost less than 20% of the original fit-out.
Authors
Tom Webster, Annabel Rootes
When most offices move, the furniture ends up in a skip.
We didn’t want that.
Earlier this year, we swapped our Scrutton Street office for a new space just north of Old Street. Some of you might remember the old place, many of you won’t. Either way, we’ll soon be hosting a session with The Engineers Reuse Collective in our new location, and we’d love to show you around.
Back in 2017, when we were fitting out Scrutton Street, we went all in on custom-built furniture. Meeting rooms, shelving, kitchen units… everything was crafted from 18–20mm ply, tied together by a colour palette inspired by Kingspan. It was bold, a bit unusual, and it soon worked its way into our branding. It became part of who we were.
So, when the move came around, we asked the team a simple question: if you could take one thing with you, what would it be? The top answer wasn’t the desks or the chairs. It was the colours. That bright, playful aesthetic had become part of our DNA. But instead of just recreating the look, we wanted to go further. These fixtures still had plenty of life left in them, and with most office furniture ending up in landfill within a decade, it felt wrong to start from scratch. We had a chance to practice what we preach and reuse.
Our new office on Wharf Road
To make it work, we brought in architect Sam Turner, who you might know from his time with Webb Yates and Interrobang. Sam modelled every piece of furniture in 3D and played around with different ways to reshape it for the new space. It was a puzzle, but eventually the pieces started to click.
Designing is one thing, but getting it built was another. That’s where Annabel, our Practice Manager, stepped in. She approached contractors we’d previously worked with, as well as those recommended to us by collaborators. Most were enthusiastic about the reuse brief, but many planned to outsource the reclamation and refabrication of the fixtures. This would have meant bringing in a third party operating out of a third location, which could have impacted the flexibility we needed and would have come with the unnecessary carbon cost associated with transport. The 3D modelling helped us plan as best we could, but there was still a need to adapt the designs as we installed, as you’d expect when working on existing buildings.
In the end, Annabel tracked down Simon Elliston of Walthamstow WoodWorks, a local, independent joiner who had both the skills and the mindset to take on the challenge. He set up his workshop right in our soon-to-be office and got to work. The first time I met him, he was dismantling our old kitchen island. It was a monster of a thing: six metres long, two wide, two layers of ply glued solid, and fixed down. Watching him, you could tell he wasn’t just sawing timber. Every cut was deliberate, every measurement exact. He treated the material as something with history and value, not just waste. It’s now doing the same job in our new kitchen, with the gaps from the old plug connections that were no longer needed precisely infilled with offcuts.
We managed to salvage about 80% of the timber used in the fittings from the old office, plus a little extra from a neighbour moving out of Scrutton Street around the same time.
The furniture in our old Scrutton Street office © Agnese Sanvito
Axometric showing the existing furniture (centre) and proposed refabricated furniture (outer) © Webb Yates
We approached the fit-out in phases. Phase one was about the essentials: storage, the kitchen and other key fixtures that Simon crafted, along with desks designed and built by some of our handier employees, and meeting spaces built by specialist contractors. This gave us the basics we needed to get up and running. We always knew our perspective would shift once we were in the space, so we left room for change. The idea was to listen to the team, see how the office worked day to day, and adapt accordingly. Phase two is now developing, shaped by what we’ve learned so far, by what the space really needs to do for us, and by what timber we have left!
Simon completed the bulk of his work in the months leading up to our official move-in date. Once we were in, he stayed on site a bit longer, finishing the planned pieces and making tweaks as we began to live in the space and see how it worked in practice.
Reuse was made possible by the use of the cam dowels to construct much of the existing furniture. Without glue, deconstruction and remodelling were made much easier. A different approach was required from most of my joinery jobs. The design and the materials were already there, although designed for a different space. It took several hours of staring at the piles of left over pieces, fixings and assorted scraps until a suitable workable solution was made. Sometimes the reuse of materials saved time, sometimes it took more time. However, there was always a saving of material cost, while also creating a visual link for the office workers back to their old space and an embodiment of the spirit of reuse Webb Yates look to champion in their own work. I was grateful to be given the freedom to remake the old pieces into new furniture in the most effective and efficient way and I feel I have the right resourcefulness, design skill and practical ability to make it happen. Simon Elliston, Joiner
As it stands, the first phase of the fit-out is finished. More than half of our old furniture has already been reused, and another 30% is in storage ready for the next round of works.
For us, this hasn’t just been a move. It’s been an exercise in design thinking, sustainability and culture. It’s about working with people who get it and who care as much as we do.
And for those who might believe that sustainability costs more: this reuse and adaptation came in at under 20% of the original 2017 fit-out, before inflation.
Get in touch if you’d like to stop by 14 Wharf Road to see our new space in person.
Reconstruction in Wharf Road © Simon Elliston
Making use of the repurposed fixtures in our new office © Dion Barrett
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