Wynk Collaborative has designed an expansion for progressive online grocery delivery company Honestbee, balancing familiarity and freshness.
June 7th, 2017
In the span of just one year, online grocery delivery service Honestbee has undergone a tremendous growth from a handful of staff to 120 employees. The growth spurt prompted the company to move from its old office to its current workspace at the Delta House last year. And now it has expanded again.
Designed by Wynk Collaborative, the Honestbee office boasts six times the real estate of its previous spaces. The office provides a variety of different workspace configurations (from long communal desks to private nooks and cubbyholes) to facilities that dream workplaces are made of – a gaming room, a whiskey room and a 25-seat theatre for example. The space mixes work, play and fun communal programmes that embody the company’s entrepreneurial beginnings.
Now the company has acquired an additional 3,300 square feet of space located one floor down in Delta House. The new space, affectionately dubbed the Honestbee II, was also designed by Wynk Collaborative and comprises open workbenches, meeting rooms and casual collaborative areas dressed in a soft palette of white, pinks, and wood grains – a fresh contrast from the cool blue-dominated colour palette of the upstairs office.
“The design intention for the new space was for it to have a quieter laboratory-like ambience,” says Leong Hon Kit, co-founder of Wynk Collaborative. “The material palette is more pared down but the space still has its own character.”
He elaborates: “It was a deliberate choice to differentiate it visually from the original Honestbee Office, and to broaden the range of work environments. This is in line with the philosophy of creating a wide range of spaces and environments to cater to various types of people and work habits.”
The entrance to the office is marked by a glass-block wall that reveals a small coffee stand. It that functions as a pantry for the office and creates a gathering point – a more intimate alternative to the large communal spaces upstairs.
Says Leong, “We still wanted to maintain some form of consistency and familiarity, which we achieved by using some of the same details, materials and furniture from the existing office upstairs.”
He adds, “The spirit of openness and collaboration remains central to the design.” The open and collaborative nature of the upstairs office is retained and tweaked to keep up with and improve the user experience. Additional ledges along the wall that serve as standing workspaces, for example, address staff feedback that the existing ones upstairs were popular but too few.
The office has been shortlisted in our INDE.Awards for The Work Space category. Click here to view the nomination and here to read an excerpt from our coverage of the office in Cubes 81.
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