Auckland’s Jasmax and Australian designers from BVN scored a top spot for commercial interior shared space design at 2019 Resene Total Colour Awards on Wednesday.
A bright orange staircase at the coworking space B:Hive building has caught judges’ attention.
Jasmax senior architect Cameron Pollock admitted the original plan was to paint stairs hot pink.
“The client was on board with the bright iconic colour but drew the line on the pink – so we went orange.”
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Orange is “powerful and catching” and is not typical in architectural use, Pollock says.
“It does not respond to any tradition and helps that stair to stand out as a sculptural element. It just looks like a sinuous, curving sculpture.”
The building had a lot of whites and greys so the stairs and furniture items pumping up the brightness.
Pollock calls orange stairs the focal point of the Smales Farm building.
“It’s an assemblage of items that have their own integrity and the stairs it’s form and it’s colour make it stand out as a centrepiece of a whole building. Most of the people who work in the community of that building congregate and interact around the atrium.”
The stairs structure was metal with many layers inside and paint-finished exterior.
Both Jasmax and BVN are big on using colour in their designs.
“We are more adventurous, and Australians are generally more renowned for using bright colours. It’s a point of difference in our work ethics.”
Pollock is humbly stoked to be topping the competition in their category.
“I was quietly optimistic that we’d do well.”
Resene’s top colour award went to the Waterfront House in Lyttleton Port for their bespoke meeting pods.
Designers Pippa Ensor, Kim Salt and Trevor Watt from Athfield Architects Limited integrated shipping containers into the project.
Resene’s general manager Nick Nightingale says the project was cleverly delivered using the colour from the port environment.
“We congratulate Athfield Architects for their masterful way of using colour in an extraordinary interior design for Lyttelton Port Company which helps bring people together from all sides of the port operation.”
