Sport Waikato

Creating purposeful spaces

When refurbishing Sport Waikato’s headquarters at Wintec’s Rotokauri Campus, Designwell used Havelock and Awake carpet tiles from Advance Flooring to create more purposeful, focused spaces.

Sport Waikato aims to drive significant transformation, encouraging greater community-wide participation in physical activity. In their new HQ, the main theme was Sport Waikato being a “pathway to achieve”, with their aim of having 75 per cent of the Waikato community actively participating in activity by 2030,’ says Head of Client Services Steve Mills at Designwell.

‘And as they’re a non-profit organisation, it was important to get the biggest impact for the budget available when designing the new space.’

Ditching the conventional office layout

Rather than break up the large open plan area with walls, the designers wanted to create spaces where project teams could collaborate freely without having the usual sea of desks.

‘There was no longer a sprawling single office space,’ says Steve. ‘The carpet was a vehicle to show obvious and intuitive spaces that made sense and show where these “metaphoric’ spaces started and stopped.’

Budget requirements meant retaining some existing flooring, so the new flooring needed to complement what was kept. ‘As the Sport Waikato logo is a full spectrum of colour, we had the scope to use any and every colour in the furniture, fixtures and flooring, with each zone being dictated by colour choices.’

Blue became a ‘hot space’ for people predominantly working on the road and needing a ‘hot desk’ when in the office. Green is a more fluid, get-together space for project teams to collaborate, while pink and grey tones define the break-out spaces.

Colour infuses a playful atmosphere

‘The colour palette was the defining factor for choosing Advance Flooring carpet tiles, the colours are inspiring and played nicely into the theme for this design,’ says Steve.

‘We also knew they are an in-stock product, so availability was not an issue, and by using them we could achieve a lot with a decent, but not extensive, budget.’