Desert At Dusk
Memocorp grand lobby, Sydney by The Stella Collective
Words Photography Upon entering the grand lobby of Memocorp’s Sydney flagship building, 259 George Street, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally wandered into a boutique design hotel. Plush seating and statement furniture abound, while metallic accents offset a powdery palette of pastels that is at once dreamy and inviting.
That the lobby, designed by Melbourne practice The Stella Collective, should so strongly evoke a hospitality space is no accident. As director Hana Hakim explains, “Our client wanted to shape the brief around the ritual of hospitality.”
Memocorp tasked The Stella Collective with designing three spaces within the 42-storey building on Sydney’s George Street: the grand lobby, end of trip facilities, and the property group’s own penthouse office. As the designers behind acclaimed hospitality spaces including Melbourne’s beloved Kettle Black, Brighton’s Red Roaster (the UK town’s oldest coffee house), and the newly opened Naim restaurant in Brisbane, Hakim and her team were the perfect fit for the project.
From the beginning, Hakim recognised that a business-as-usual approach to corporate design wouldn’t cut it. “I really think that everything needs to have the heart and soul of hospitality,” she muses. “This is the place where people spend almost all their time away from their family, and it should be a wonderful experience.” Hakim rejects the notion that corporate environments must be sterile, impersonal spaces, and instead champions a vision of workplaces that support and delight their occupants. “Why can’t we create a work environment that adds positivity to people’s days and lives?” she asks. “Isn’t that why we design?”
This drive to create a genuinely positive environment is evident throughout the tripartite project, but perhaps most clearly in the grand lobby. Here, The Stella Collective inverts the typical understanding of the lobby as a transient zone for passing through to instead deliver a destination space that invites people to linger. Proof that subtle acts are often the most transformative, the lobby effectively dismantles the accepted framework for corporate design and replaces it with a warmer, more fluid approach that eschews showiness and imposition. “It’s not too forceful, and it’s not too distracting: everything just falls perfectly into place,” says Hakim. “Design doesn’t need to be over-the-top at all.”