Check out Hardhat's new indoor arena.
We’ve been trying to suss out Australia’s best breakout space for quite a while now. There was this space that looked like a nightclub, and this one with a library and sleeping booth. Hardhat’s though, just may take the cake.
The Prahran-based digital agency’s breakout space has a whisky bar, a workshop, and yes, a half-court basketball arena.
“Every morning we start our day there, [the court] just talking, and chatting about our plans for the day,” says Hardhat managing director Justin Kabbani.
“It’s a great multi-purpose space – we use it for meetings, for seminar, even parties. At the moment it’s currently covered floor to ceiling in coloured cards to help plan out a client project.”
While games aren’t anything new to the world of creative agency offices, it’s the size of this “game” space that stands out. And unlike other traditional creative-agency games like foosball and pinball, the basketball court isn’t just there to get the creative juices flowing. It also has an important health and wellness function.
On Monday nights the basketball court is used as a yoga studio; on Wednesday night, for boxing; and throughout the week as “a place to shoot a few hoops” between work.
“We don't just pay lip-service to health and wellness,” Kabbani says.
Alongside the court features a cabinet full of aligned basketballs and trophies, which wouldn’t look out of place in a Wes Anderson movie, and a mini grandstand, which gives it a high-school gym vibe.
The bar sits opposite, with a clear glass table, black stools, a white neon light and a fine selection of whiskies. It’s a clear throwback to the Mad Men area.
“The best thing about it is that you can celebrate things as they happen. It means we don’t need to split and head to the pub to celebrate something, we can just jump into the whisky bar,” says Kabbani.
“There is a romance to whisky and a mindfulness experience to it too: the visual attractiveness of the bottle; the attempt at pronouncing the name; the dull pop of the cork coming out; pouring the smallest amount into a glass; the pause; the tiny taste and then the contemplation of the flavour.”
Although not technically part of Hardhat’s breakout area, the office’s noodle desk also deserves a mention. The curvy workstation winds throughout the building like a worm, seating everyone in the office. It’s an idea that came from Kabbani’s experience in crisis management.
“When we moved into the space, one of the things we thought about before was whenever shit hit the fan, we would always move the project into the boardroom. We’d just sit around a boardroom table, and use the walls around them; that seemed to work really well,” says Kabbani.
“So when we were planning the space, we thought instead of putting in a typical desk, how many boardroom tables could we fit in. Then we were like – what if there was one giant boardroom table that everyone sat around? That morphed into what it is today.”
“The desk is great because it means we have lots of conversations.”
The Hardhat office was designed by renowned local architect Robert Davidov, and built in 2015.
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