What's old is new again

Big news for us this week was that we moved into our new office. Then, not one week later, a fella called Paul Barbera emailed to say that photo's he'd taken of our old office were now up on his website, right here.

Just one set of Friday afternoon drinks and it feel like the old office is long forgotten (hey they were good drinks), until you look around and see all the familiar fitout. We first moved into our own office just over a year agon in August '10, the week our Greens ad for Gruen Nation hit the airwaves. It was scary to suddenly not be subletting someone else's space and to have a lease that said you have to keep paying up every month for a year but, of course like all things, it quickly became just the way things were.

One of the things we endeavoured to do was fit out the office in the most sustainable way possible, using chests of drawers and sideboards from Vinnies as deskends and only resorting to plywood for the bits we had to. In decking out the new office, the brief to architects Workshop1 were the same. Come see our old office, figure it out how you can reuse it all to build the new office. So that's what they did.

The result is fresh yet familiar and, we think, something to be proud of. Shelves are simple but effective, storage is plentiful, the board room is made of recycled timbers and there is a visitors parking bike rack.

In short, we're happy in our new home. And grateful to Paul Barbera for taking the time to photograph our old one.