“Where we place ourselves is becoming increasingly important,” explains Qb Studios’ director Alex Brennan. Qb Studios (made up of directors Brennan, Michael Fisher and Tom Harding) is a Christchurch-based business that has this idea at its very heart. It creates co-working and curated workspaces for businesses, which provide private office space, tailored to the size of the business, alongside shared member spaces, such as meeting rooms, kitchens and lounges. The three directors and founders do the design work themselves and many of the buildings’ elements are designed and manufactured as bespoke elements.

“Generally, we try to keep the spaces reasonably timeless,” says Brennan. “And I suppose simplicity is something that tends to be a feature of the spaces – the palettes are often quite neutral, with some pops of colour… you’re creating a canvas for people to work in, for people to have their own environment within that space.”

With this signature aesthetic, Qb Studios’ latest addition to its portfolio of curated workspaces sits proudly in central Christchurch, in an area that was one of the first to be redeveloped after the 2011 earthquake. Connecting the past with the future, the latest offering is a blend of the old with the new.

Firstly, in 2017, the firm renovated and revamped a 630m² existing industrial rubber factory by introducing internal steel and glass structures into the original triple-brick shell. The aesthetic of this half of the curated workspace is clean, crisp and white, with the original timber trusses and gantry crane in place as reminders of the past. Once the first half was completed, Qb Studios purchased the site next door. Brennan explains: “When we bought the site, it was basically a car park; it was a building that had been knocked down after the earthquake. Then, we almost flipped a mirror image of the first building and went for darker tones.”

The other half is a clever 530m² new-build extension, which has the size and shape of the existing building but is a modern mirror-image extension, retaining the gable roof form. The new extension uses modern materials and darker tones. Together, the two halves make for a successful network of businesses, with a ground-floor café thrown into the mix. 

Recalling the first space Qb completed in Christchurch in 2014, Alex Brennan says, “We got a big old warehouse in Christchurch and we built a prototype… a kind of little village within the existing warehouse”. Many businesses in Christchurch at the time had been dispersed in the aftermath of the earthquake and many people were working from home or in the suburbs. There was a feeling of isolation. “We were very lucky and it went very well… I think, and there was a real demand for people to come back into a community-type environment.”

Qb Studios now has a portfolio of spaces in Auckland and Christchurch. While its approach of repurposing “hidden or forgotten” existing buildings has remained the same, its execution has moved on a lot since that first successful space. As Brennan explains, “We have brought our office spaces to a higher level. Initially, we left it to our members/tenants to furnish their studios as they wished. Now, things are fully furnished with artworks, plants, etc.”

He believes this is a reflection of a growing demand for flexibility amongst the buildings’ member tenants. “In a time of increasing complexity, people value simplicity. The pace of change is accelerating and people and businesses need to be more agile than ever before. They need to be able to move into a space that allows them to ‘do what they do’.”

All of this is reflective of the changing nature of commercial property, where it is increasingly popular for property no longer to be simply just that but to become a service that businesses and people can use. “This is a trend that we can see across the spectrum, where music (Spotify), films (Netflix), cars (Uber) and scooters (Lime) have gone from things we own to services we consume,” says Brennan. “So our offering has developed along those lines as the pace of change has increased. There is a greater need for us to provide a fully curated environment where these people and businesses can shine and thrive.”

Brennan has an interesting analogy to describe the range of co-working spaces: “I think you can almost compare it to tourist accommodation where, at one end of the spectrum, you have backpackers and, at the other, you have boutique hotels, and each has a different energy. At a backpackers, there’s an energy of connecting and vibrancy and so forth, and that tends to appeal to a person at a particular stage in their life. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, you have a boutique hotel where people come in if they want a little bit more independence and privacy, but they’re still sharing lounges and bars and the general identity of the hotel. The space is still curated, and there’s still something about being around other people that people want, rather than being in an Airbnb, for example.”

The spaces that Qb Studios creates are at the latter end of this spectrum. “Within our spaces, everybody has their own independent office and they share lounges, they share meeting rooms and kitchens and so forth, but they have a door that they can close and they have their own private space. They’re able to have their own identity.”

With co-living and co-working spaces becoming increasingly popular, Qb Studios’ offerings are likely to continue. “Sometimes I think technology is making us more and more connected than we’ve ever been before, but it’s also making us more isolated; I feel that these kinds of spaces are almost becoming the new village squares where people are actually able to return to the same physical environment.”

This article first appeared in Interior magazine.

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