A Room Within a Room

E Space is our studio. "Just right" is the stance that suits us best: a small team of fewer than twenty, a flat structure, flexible ways of working and efficient collaboration, giving rise to a more independent mindset and a more individual character.

E Studio's new office lies tucked away in the city. The whole space reads as a room within a room: solid volumes set down inside the existing shell respond to the building's geometry. With a pure, intuitive approach, the design explores an independent and free spatial form, its particular force coming from deliberately blurring the line between the natural and the artificial.

Non-Tradition

The office sits in a sunken structure closely tied to the landscape outside. The roof is a lawn garden, which gives the ceiling its partial slope and beams with a strong sense of visual stretch.

An unconventional trapezoidal plan and the collision between the raw exposed concrete of the ceiling and finely made industrial stainless steel give the space a brutalist edge while meeting every functional need.

Minimal Area

The layout does away with traditional private offices; an open plan makes communication and collaboration more efficient and lets the team enjoy creating together. "Just right" is the design team's most natural stance, and a flat structure and flexible ways of working bring out a more independent mindset and a more individual character.

E Studio is a team of creatives born in the 1990s from many disciplines. It guards against the inertia of experience, encourages independent and dialectical thinking, and welcomes open debate from which its own views emerge. Its varied practice spans architecture, interiors, branding and landscape, and working across so many fields keeps the team learning and using cross-disciplinary thinking to push the boundaries of the industry.

At the entrance stands an L-shaped block of matte stainless steel. A timber viewing platform extends above the server room. The wooden box in the middle of the space is the tea room, its roof a lounge looking over the office. A grid of cross-shaped metal modules covers an entire wall, ready to take shelves or panels anywhere to display material samples.

Large tropical plants are placed throughout, their natural vigour heightened against the rough concrete.

Discovery

Beside the work area grows a coconut palm that nearly reaches the ceiling, creating an informal place to gather beneath the tree.

"Schools began with a man under a tree who did not know he was a teacher, discussing his realisations with a few who did not know they were students." — Louis Kahn

Meeting Room

Good design never comes easily, and designers spend much of their time turning ideas over, so a comfortable workplace matters. The studio's atmosphere changes with the hour and the occasion: as night falls, dimming light gives the mind room to wander and slow down.

Rough and Refined

A suspended light curtain opens up more ways to use the space: its changing light gives after-work drinks, salons and birthday parties each a different mood. It is also the team's own rig for programming and testing lighting, so every lighting design can be proven feasible.

It is not perfect, and if it were, it would be less good. Designers are skilled presenters who know how to show their work at its most striking, with polished composition and retouching, sometimes to a perfection detached from reality. E Studio tries to return to reality, presenting each project as truthfully as possible and staying true to its original intent.

Client
E Studio

Location
Shenzhen, China

Area
260 m²

Completion Date
2022.10

Design Firm
E Studio

Lead Designer
Fan, Junjian
Zhou, Xuanzhuo

Design Team
Hu, Yulong

FF&E
Zhou, Jing
Deng, Changyi

Lighting Design
Shenzhen Moke Lighting

Photographer
Zhang, Chao
Luo, Canhui
Tan, Huitao
Zhuo, Yueheng

Main Materials
Fair-faced concrete
Matte stainless steel
Pandomo
Gabriel
OSB
Oak flooring

Suppliers
MATSU
Herman Miller
HAG
Aosi Furniture (custom furniture)
Dahuangfeng Stainless Steel
Pandomo
Gabriel
Zhijing Building Materials

Construction
Shenyi Decoration Engineering (Liang, Zhihua)