Ekho Studio has completed a 7,000 sq ft office design for pharmaceutical company Alexion, recently acquired by AstraZeneca. The new workspace is located within AstraZeneca’s existing offices at St Pancras Square, London, with the scope also including a business meeting suite for AstraZeneca, directly linking to Alexion’s office space on the 6th floor. The result is a professional, high-quality workspace, where elegant Art Deco-inspired cues fuse with the calming use of curved forms.
The Brief
Alexion’s pharmaceutical mission is to transform the lives of people affected by rare diseases and devastating conditions by continuously innovating and creating meaningful value in all that they do.
The brief for the new design was to enable greater collaboration to drive an innovation agenda, as well as ensuring the new space harmonised with AstraZeneca’s existing offices. These include the 21,000 sq ft, award-winning commercial head office for AstraZeneca UK, located on the building’s 8th and 9th floors and designed by Ekho Studio in 2021/22, becoming the agency’s first completed project.
‘The new 2024 project had a two-part brief’ Sarah Dodsworth, Founding Partner at Ekho Studio explained. ‘First of all, we were asked to create a dedicated office for Alexion’s team, comprised of dedicated desk space and open collaborative areas. Secondly, our task was to design a business meeting suite, made up of a shared front-of-house reception for Alexion and AstraZeneca and leading to a waiting lounge area, comprised of hospitality spaces, quiet zones and meeting rooms, created to serve AstraZeneca’s global community.’
The original 2021/22 project, designed by Ekho Studio, was considered a benchmark for the new project in terms of creating a consistent design language. Alexion also asked for a little more colour to be used in their individual section. Other changes to the earlier project included a more elevated palette for the front-of-house area, including deeper timber tones, more curved forms and the use of pink clay.
Design Approach
‘The principle of curves and rounded edges inspiring calm is well-established’, Sarah Dodsworth explained. ‘We really embraced this on this scheme, incorporating rounded furniture, from sofas to chairbacks and incidental tables, together with curved joinery. We also created curvature across interior dividing walls to soften transitions and create intriguing sightlines.’
Lighting was also key in ensuring a feeling of calm within the project, with soft and refined layers adding another strong element to the interior. The design boasts several large, multi-use audio-visual meeting rooms, as well as more informal and flexible areas for teams to gather and share ideas. The successful integration of technology was a major piece of the brief, to ensure planned and impromptu collaboration and idea-sharing would be supported throughout the office.
‘The design is high-quality in terms of materiality, but it’s never ostentatious’ Ekho Studio Designer Ellie McCrum added. ‘We wanted to create a contemporary, high-tech working environment and used a muted, tonal colour palette for that, with plenty of textured surfaces, from the use of ribbed leather to claywork wall finishes.’
Design Walk-Through
The new front of house area establishes the scheme’s calm and sophisticated tone and introduces an environment designed to foster collaboration, where work and informal meetings are no longer siloed.
The business lounge is comprised of a small hospitality space, an informal meeting lounge and quiet pods with a large 16-person flexible training and meeting room. A larger, dedicated meeting room for 18-20 people follows, with a blue curved ceiling. Across to the left is the main business lounge, featuring a central island unit - an open space with upholstered seating, which can also be used for informal meetings.
The high-quality steel planters in the scheme include one set into the main joinery and are a great example of re-use in this environment, having originally been used as part of a factory manufacturing process for AstraZeneca in their Macclesfield facility. A plaque has been made to explain the story behind the planters and where they came from, prior to being polished and repurposed.
Beyond this area is the 28-desk office for the Alexion team, along with a collaboration zone and a library / quiet zone, plus a flexible central hot desking zone with blue chairs and flexible whiteboards. For the office area, the Alexion team, together with the designers, selected a Milliken carpet.
Intimate areas with soft seating are scattered thoughtfully around the traditional desk spaces. High-quality finishes, soft lighting and warm timbers contribute to a calm and relaxed feel. The material palette was thoughtfully curated to focus on warmth, tactility and comfort so that individual spaces flow together seamlessly and cohesively.
The modern office zones are detailed with timber raft ceilings, layered lighting and mid-century-inspired ergonomic furniture. Natural timber materials are complemented by monolithic concrete flooring, tactile wall renders, rich hues and soft pastel tones, along with live planting and carefully-selected artwork.
Wellbeing and Sustainability
AstraZeneca places employee wellbeing high on their agenda, and, in this scheme, this is addressed across a range of touchpoints - through the carefully designed variety of adaptable work-settings; natural/healthy material choices; a colour scheme which considers neurodiversity; abundant live planting and improved access to quality outdoor space.
One of the great ambitions for the scheme was to incorporate as many sustainable and innovative materials and products as possible, without losing any of the feeling of refined quality. A focus on sustainability was also ever present throughout the design process and finishes in the scheme feature both natural and renewable choices. Within the bustling social space and business meeting lounge, Troldtekt wood wool acoustic panels were selected for ceilings, for example, whilst counters are made from Foresso – a timber terrazzo product produced in the UK from waste wood. Natural timber, the low carbon go-to, is used throughout for ceiling rafts and joinery pieces, along with linoleum surfaces and recycled wool acoustic panels and upholstery.
Balancing Opposites
‘This a high-tech workspace with a particularly calm, elegant and high-quality feel’, Sarah Dodsworth concluded. ‘It’s also a very sustainable scheme – with a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating - that refuses to wear its sustainable credentials too obviously. In fact, it shows how far the industry has come in terms of both client and designer buy-in to sustainability and how much suppliers are innovating, proving once and for all that sustainable materials no longer have to have a rough-and-ready aesthetic or offer any kind of compromise when it comes to quality.’
About Ekho Studio:
Ekho Studio is a creative consultancy set up by Founding Partners Sarah Dodsworth and Rachel Withey in 2021. The company is a fresh force in design, looking to shape how people live, work and play for the better, based on the belief that design can completely transform people’s lives and environments, as well as influencing productivity and wellbeing, through good practice, research and innovation.
Sarah Dodsworth is a member of the BCO and regularly serves on the judging panels for BCO North, whilst Rachel Withey is a Design Ambassador for Design Insider / Commercial Interiors UK. Both Founders write and speak regularly on themes ranging from wellbeing and sustainability to the importance of biophilia for publications such as FX, Designer, Design Week, Design Insider, Material Source and The Journal of Biophilic Design. Ekho Studio won four awards and was shortlisted for four more in its first year of business, whilst in 2023, the agency was named ‘Breakthrough Talent of the Year’ at the FX International Interior Design Awards.
