In designing the office for a creative business, it is understood that commonplace cubicles and a staid backdrop don’t quite offer inspiration. This is what went through the mind of interior designer Cherin Tan, founder and Creative Director of LAANK, when she was tasked with designing the new office of Freeflow Productions, a video-production company specialising in filming and post-production work.

“Being in the creative field, and needing a space that will often see clients visiting, Freeflow Productions wanted to shape an office that fosters creativity and is comfortable and welcoming both for external visitors and their own staff,” says Tan.

Spread over three storeys in a shophouse, the interior design springs from the idea of ‘different perspectives’. The idea was to project the feeling of being on a film set. The key motifs are that of framing as a nod to the industry and the office as a home away from home given the long hours the staff spends there.

“We wanted people to register the different ‘frames’ they move though as they enter and exit different spaces in the building,” says Tan on the former. Rather than solid partitions, the various areas are defined by screens, glass and the application of various colours and materials.

For instance, on the first storey, the reception and lounge segues into a meeting area with a bar-height table and stools with awards on show, framed by a black linear portal resembling a catwalk. Glass partitions with silk-screened patterns provide glimpses of people at work. In the main workspace on the second storey, this motif reoccurs as a wall and ceiling panel that hovers over desks.

To perpetuate the idea of a home, a pitched-roof shape outlines the pantry in the first storey meeting room. Warm timber panelling and planters frame the second-storey pantry while domed thresholds augment the sense of domesticity and informality and the graphical hanging of light pendant wires draws the eye upward. Such gestures create cosiness within the foil of raw and natural materials such as cement flooring and exposed brick walls.

Post-production work is usually an unseen part of the final film but here Tan has added doses of glamour that celebrate this process. The first-storey toilet, wrapped in mirrors, illumined with suspended lighting and anchored with a fountain-like communal washbasin, offers a stunning, kaleidoscopic encounter.

Meanwhile, the video-editing suites recall a luxury hotel lounge with ambient lighting, marble and brass surfaces, and plush leather sofas. “We wanted a space that would prioritise clients’ comfort, given the long hours they will spend in the building as they review edits with the creative teams… all the more so to make them feel treasured and well catered to,” explains Tan.

Many points of interest are located throughout the Freeflow Productions office that makes it interesting to meander though. If the spatial journey was a film, the narrative is a multi-faceted and layered one indeed.

Photography by Marc Tan / Studio Periphery