When you enter the VivaKi office, a holding company that brings together digital and media services, you know it’s a space where ideas are given form and converted into design and products. It’s housed on the ground floor of a three-floor commercial complex in Mumbai’s Kanjurmarg area, and ideas come at you from every direction the minute you enter—starting with the rusted wall at the entrance. Rust, to VivaKi, represents inclusiveness and openness to change, and that’s how they would like to describe the organization—a workspace that is all about change and new ideas.
A colony of nine
The men’s restroom has a pink colour scheme.
The space is deep and wide, so much so that as you walk in from the common atrium of the complex into VivaKi’s reception area, it is impossible to see the far end of the office. The organization heads at VivaKi decided to give the workspace a common name, The Hive, for an integrated identity.
The reception area opens to a large, common recreation space, next to which is the main conference area called Hive Central, with four conference rooms collectively called Hive Express. The rest of the space is divided into mini offices for nine companies, which provide services such as media planning, media buying and rural marketing, all under the VivaKi umbrella.
Kaushik Chakravorty, country head, Enhance (the retail branding wing of VivaKi), asks us to imagine a beehive. “Many times a single client hires all the services that we provide. So we are separate parts working towards a single goal,” he says. And that is what they wanted reflected in this workspace—many parts coming together as a whole.
The bee motif recurs in the artwork across the office.
Hive Central epitomizes VivaKi’s love for the “next big ideas”. Giving an appropriate theme to that space was important, so a contest was held among employees to suggest a design. The winning entry: the conference rooms painted like a train, with the area around them designed like a railway station, complete with a large wall clock and station bell. “The railway station signifies the spirit of Mumbai and is inspired from Bombay Central. It went well with Hive Central, which is a place for everyone in office to come together,” says Chakravorty.
A 120ft-long bright orange shelf divides the office into two parts and serves as a library wall. “We elevated the library to give another viewpoint to a space that’s flat,” says Sanjeev Punjabi of Spasm Design, who designed the space with his partner, Sangeeta Merchant.
On either side of this wall are the individual work areas of the nine companies. “Since there are different allied offices that need to be housed within one space, they wanted us to make sure that they all retain their individuality even while blending into a single working group,” says Punjabi. So every company space has its own colour scheme and graffiti.
Humming with character