Golden age of travel: Online Republic
Designer Jacquette Barrington said, “This wasn’t about visitors or people coming in – it was always a place for staff.”
The ‘concierge’ desk in reception channels the heyday of commercial world travel, with playful peach wall panelling, lighting, and travel posters. A Source Mondial kilim rug sits on the polished concrete painted mosaic flooring.
The training room is a multi-purpose space, with a boardroom table designed to convert to a table-tennis table. Above hangs a custom-designed Cape Interiors/Retro Lights pendant, featuring vintage festoon string lights.
Light-hearted touches are found throughout the interior, including humorous oil paintings of high-achieving staff.
The team enjoy the best view in the house from under Ido Interior Design’s plantation hanging lights.
The business is committed to providing a high-quality service to its clients and the designers saw the opportunity to bring that same service to the Online Republic staff.
The café and bar area offers great coffee and staff-brewed craft beer (after hours).
Timber slat walls in Resene Scooter give a multi-purpose acoustic room and quiet meeting booths a retro Kiwi caravan feel.
A relaxed breakout cabana, with a UFL Group sofa in James Dunlop fabric.
The call centre space enjoys natural lighting and colourful central storage units.
Cane hanging pod chairs from The Hotel Space encourage a relaxed vibe.
The reception space most notably pays tribute to the art-deco era, with grand chandeliers and antique-style tile stencilling on the concrete floors.
Floorplan.
Online Republic sought an interior that reflected it’s corporate culture. The result is a new workplace that takes staff on a vacation to the heyday of travel.
Wearing your best suit, your gloves and your hat, you stepped onto a Pan Am flight in the 1950s and were greeted by a level of opulence and luxury unseen today. You were dressed in your best and you had somewhere important to go; it was this sense of occasion, characterising the heyday of travel, that Stack Business Interiors aimed to capture for Online Republic’s new-build fit-out in Wynyard Quarter.
But, unlike a mid-century flight, the opulent space was never meant for the passengers, says Stack’s designer Jacquette Barrington. “This wasn’t about visitors or people coming in – it was always a place for staff.”
The new workspace for this Kiwi success story in global car rental, motorhome rental and cruise bookings operation, allows all 163 staff members to coexist on the same floor, in the same building (something that was no longer possible in their previous space) and provides opportunities for collaboration, innovation and interaction between staff members across the IT, call-centre, HR and management teams.
Naturally, staff retention in call-centre operations is a key issue faced by this industry, so setting about ‘serving’ staff with a luxury space, as well as de-corporatising the workspace, was a key objective.
This approach is nothing new to Online Republic and it’s thinking around company culture. A sense of humour and fun has always been part of the ethos; in it’s previous offices (a 1920s’ space with period charm) when a staff member hit a top sales goal, a full-scale, 19th-century-style, tongue-in-cheek oil portrait of the staff member was commissioned and hung in a huge gilt frame for all to admire.
Despite not having the wall space to continue hanging their high-achieving employees’ portraits, the new space has the same quirky approach to enhancing staff culture.
Stack’s David Maurice says Online Republic has always had a strong identity and staff culture and the new space has simply allowed the company to explore this further.
“They’re global in what they do but they retained a lot of their identity and they’ve evolved it.”
The business is committed to providing a high-quality service to its clients and Stack saw the opportunity to bring that same service to the Online Republic staff: by recreating a space that radiates the joy of a good vacation.
The concept was to evoke a ‘hotel’ or ‘resort’ ambience; the travel posters, art-deco detailing in the lighting, curves and wall panelling, and the commercial ‘hospitality’ café-feel of the cafeteria transport staff to a time of decadence.
The orientations of the concierge counters, bars, and printer counters encourage staff to play both host and vacationer at once. Choosing to walk up to and take a seat at the bar or walk around behind to host your colleague creates a sense of team at a social level and encourages members of staff to serve each other.
Foosball tables, arcade games and hanging cane chairs are all available for downtime, and, naturally, the boardroom table was custom-made to convert to a table-tennis table after meetings – something employees insisted on after its popularity in their previous workspace.
Also borrowed from that office space is the 1920s’ period charm and a sense of history – it was something Online Republic enjoyed and wished to retain, despite the modern envelope of the new space.
The reception space most notably pays tribute to the art-deco era, with grand chandeliers and antique-style tile stencilling on the concrete floors.
A mid-century palette of peach and teal with brass accents references the popular colours in the day of Pan Am while retro tropical wallpaper enhances the ambience of holiday-making. Delicate sheer curtains soften the HR office and frame the magnificent Waitematā Harbour view and are repeated in the interior pergola, replete with its bespoke, mid-century, tropical- print sofa.
Staff members can take private calls, and hold small meetings or conference calls from within a quaint, cosy, retro-print-clad booth: a reference to the Kiwi caravan holiday.
Online Republic has always been committed to providing a top-notch ‘holiday service’ to its clients. It will be no surprise, then, to those who know the company that it provides no less of a service to its own employees; a keg of homebrew beer is on tap in the cafeteria every Friday night for staff drinks.
