At home at work

The Superette team feel at home in their new headquarters.

SUPERETTE OWNERS RICKIE DEE and James Rigby don’t work from home – but they’ve designed their new Takapuna headquarters to feel like they do. Granted, not everyone has a neon “Do Epic Shit” sign hanging in their entranceway, but if it was pretty much your family motto you might consider it.

Other “things we say around here” are hung on other walls – “Not Here to Fuck Spiders” in Rickie and James’s office and “Start Somewhere” outside the meeting rooms. It’s all part of the plan to create a fun working environment that people instantly feel comfortable visiting.

The family of 14 – Rickie and James plus 12 – moved into their new officehome in July this year after 10 months of construction. It was a move prompted by the most common real estate prompter of all, the need for more space.

They found it in a large warehouse fortuitously located adjacent to an even larger carpark on Lake Road. Formerly a Paper Plus storeroom, the building was a “horrible rabbit warren of rooms”, but Rickie and James saw through that to the bones of what it had been – Takapuna’s oldest commercial building and home to the area’s original post office. “It was the pitched ceiling and wooden floors that sold us,” Rickie says.

First point of business was demolishing everything inside. The second was commissioning architecture design duo Material Collective to do the fit-out. “We wanted to use them because we liked their work and we knew that they would •