Sustainable Colorful and Flat Pack Office Furniture

Moving into the old Ford manufacturing building in Richmond, CA, Sunpower had a lot of space to fill, a lot of people to house, and a lot of problems to solve... like making this enormous warehouse space feel like home. Formerly PowerLight, they moved from their long-time Berkeley home after merging with two other companies to become a much larger commercial and industrial solar power provider. Sunpower does those huge installs of solar panels you see on the roof and parking lots of commercial buildings, and also does whole industrial power stations too. We were very excited to work with them, as we too are really into sustainable ideas and businesses.

SunPower, being concerned with environmental issues, was excited at our sustainable and environmental approach to design and building. For their office we created a system of flat pack furniture that uses no fasteners but instead a friction slot. All of the furniture seen here was delivered to the site flat, and slotted quickly together onsite with no other tools than a rubber mallet. The CNC-cut slots and tabs perfectly fit together with just enough friction to make everything snug and sturdy.

This makes for more environmentally sensitive tables, for there are less parts, less energy in producing and delivering them, and less effort spent on-site putting them together. More than forty tables and benches were delivered in two trips of a standard delivery van and assembled in about a day.

Each piece of furniture we created was made of a locally purchased FSC certified Maple. We used a product called Europly from Columbia Forest Products. This is a high-grade 13-layer maple plywood, all sustainable, from a company that's been making nothing but formaldehyde-free plywood since 2005.

The accent colors on each piece were done with a water-based dye applied by hand. The colors match the company colors, for a touch of internal branding.

Because of the slotting technique, the accent colors poke through to the surface of all the furniture designs, adding interest and individuality to each one.

This was one of the client's favorite aspects of these tables. That and that they were sustainable, quick to make and assemble, and affordable. The deadline on this project was tight, yet over forty custom tables were made, delivered, and assembled in less than a month.

With exposed bracing, polished concrete floors and huge ware house style metal framed windows, the building has a beautiful raw aesthetic and a wonderful history. At one time it was the main Ford Motor Company assembly plant, it's now being renovated into a waterfront office park with stunning views of the bay and city.

With this rich history in mind, we took ideas from the simple tables set up by the construction workers as they renovated the building. The client loved their humble and raw nature, as well as their improvisational spirit. But raw messy plywood doesn't make for nice office furniture, after all, so we took this as our starting point and worked from there to a better design.

Keeping the simple and raw feel, we softened the design of the tables, stools and benches from the original influence by adding curves and color. We also adapted all the sizes to fit a standard office for ergonomics, as well as for practicality in moving, material usage in their production, and setup.

The curves and color inspired more designs to soften the huge industrial building, and add some whimsy into the space.

The smaller tables were put in the shared cubicle areas for additional work surfaces and informal meetings. We worked with the client to come up with a fun non-standard way to have name tags on the cubical walls. The final result was this round “Name Plate” that hangs from our custom hook.

Each nameplate has a slot for a name to slide into, can be relocated easily, and can be color-stained and personalized at the whim of it's owner.

The custom hook we designed to be not just to add some fun to the cubicles, but to be very useful as well. With hooks on both sides it is used to hang the custom Name Plates, bags, purses, headphones or what ever!

Signs were needed to post information and area names around the office. We made the signs eight feet tall, as to tower above the the cubicle walls so they can be seen anywhere in the office.

Each sign is double-sided with material for pinning into, so that announcements and such can be pinned up easily.

We designed 3 different kinds of signs to mix throughout the office. Each sign has a colored leg (that matches the other furniture colors) and they are all made of FSC certified Maple with a Homasote pin board on top. Homasote is made of pressed recycled paper.

This is the “box sign” which has a pin board Homasote top around the box. Already the various teams have taken these over, turning the boxes into team document in-boxes, lost-and-found bins, or even dioramas.

All the signs, just like like all the furniture for this space, are made without screws and can be taken apart easily into smaller pieces.

Finally we designed this table to hold one of SunPower’s solar panels. These were special tables for the executive offices, and as such, the client wanted a different feel for them.

The surface of the panel is a smooth plastic, and the solar panel drops into the steel frame of the table. The panel is fully functional and collecting power as it sits in this sunny office.