Diageo is a true elite liquor empire. 8 of the top 20 best-selling brands, including Johnnie Walker, White Horse and Crown Royal whiskey, Smirnoff vodka, Baileys liqueur, Captain Morgan rum, Gordon's gin and Guinness beer, are produced by this particular company. Planning the creation of a new representative office in Moscow and renting an entire floor of one of the Moscow City skyscrapers for this purpose, Diageo asked the Sergey Estrin Architectural Workshop to design an office whose main theme would be the diversity of the company's products.
The design of the entrance area suggested itself: the background for the reception desk is a transparent wall illuminated from the inside, on which images of all the most famous Diageo drinks are applied by photo printing. Figuratively, the theme of alcohol is supported by the design of the ceiling: numerous lamps are hidden behind snow-white plasterboard elements, shaped like crushed ice.
“We can say that the essence of the customer's wishes came down to one word -“individuality,”recalls Sergey Estrin. “We were tasked with emphasizing the individuality of each of the brands in the interior.” Fortunately, the very structure of the new office made it possible - for each brand, a maximum of two, it was planned to set aside its own meeting room. The area of these premises varied greatly depending on the importance and popularity of a particular drink, but their total number was so large (over 20) that the architect almost immediately suggested grouping them along the outer perimeter of the rented floor. Thus, a kind of “street” of elite alcohol appeared in the office, encircling the main space - open space, in which the employees' workplaces are located. Having approved the layout proposed by the architect, the customer specified the requirements for the interior somewhat: the main stake should have been made on the design of the "business cards" of the brands, while the actual workplaces had to be solved in line with the ultimate functionality.
Hence the laconicism of the design of the "street" itself - from the outside, the appearance of meeting rooms is unified. Each of them is accessed by frosted glass doors decorated with a stylized image of a bottle. The only way they differ from each other is the color and the brand name itself, which is also duplicated on the signs posted along the corridor and helping to quickly navigate the "assortment". The entrance to the meeting rooms is also distinguished by the flooring of a different color - mainly the carpet of a noble dark gray color is used in the open space, and paths of bright colors shoot out from under the doors, as if the drinks could somehow leak out. These vibrant color accents spread further through the office - architects use similar colors to decorate partitions between employees' desks, which adds a tangible drop of lightness and positiveness to the understated atmosphere of open space.
As for the design of the negotiation rooms themselves, here Sergey Estrin notes with regret that not all of the initially agreed ideas have been implemented. The architects worked very carefully on the visual embodiment of the image of each brand, but, as often happens, the budget and super-tight deadlines, alas, made their own adjustments. And yet, the main idea was preserved - in the Diageo representative office, a whole gallery of bright, diverse premises was created, visually representing the variety of products created by the company.
So, for the "representation" of the famous Scottish single malt whiskey Talisker, architects, for example, came up with a room that imitates a small distillery, lined with bricks. True, everything looked much more brutal in the sketches, Estrin admits: it was supposed to use real brick (not tiles), and make niches not decorative, but quite functional. The room of the Captain Morgan and White Horse brands should have turned out to be just as brutal - the aesthetics of rum prompted the authors to make the interior from bog oak, decorating the exposed beams with metal rivets. In reality, the wardroom of the pirate ship does not look so "burnt" - the light shade and the polished surface of the laminate have created an effect that is rather chamber and emphatically fine looking.
Closer to the original idea, we managed to realize the largest meeting room Diageo - a kind of "joint headquarters" of all the sorts of whiskey sold. The architects finished the walls of this room with black embossed plaster, which was given the texture of pressed leather, and at the eye level of people sitting at the tables along the entire perimeter, a narrow strip of LED illumination was launched. This golden seam, without being particularly striking, reminds of the noble color of the aged whiskey.
The meeting room dedicated to the Venezuelan rum Casica turned out to be very characteristic. Here, the walls are decorated with vibrant photo prints of cocktails that include this drink. In fact, the room from the inside is likened to a glass filled exactly to the level of the eyes of the people in it: above the “waterline” to the very ceiling, only spectacular spray scatters.
