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Azure office, Kiev

Published: 12-Jul-2011

The intriguing use of surfaces and colour for these offices breaks new ground for interior design in eastern Europe, with a traditional office seeming to lurk behind a surreal new skin

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Details

Client: Azure
Design: Sergey Makhno and Vasily Butenko
Size: 126 sq m
Completion time: Twelve months

Project Details

Ukraine may not be the first place you’d look for great interior design, but as this project in Kiev by architect, designer and artist Sergey Makhno and his design partner Vasily Butenko shows, the axis of European design may well be shifting.

Makhno’s career as a designer has been somewhat unconventional. After graduating from Kiev National University of Building and Architecture and the Academic School of Design in Moscow, Makhno worked as a karate instructor and later as a writer and furniture designer before founding his eponymous design practice in 1999 and teaming up with interior and furniture designer Butenko.

Makhno and Butenko often use contrasting materials and design styles in their work, and the Azure office is no exception. The scheme blends wood, concrete and Corian to create a surreal, almost Daliesque, interior which is both practical and fantastic.

The walls and ceilings are clad in blue Corian, which peels away in places to reveal wooden storage units underneath – almost as if a more sober, traditional-looking office is trapped inside an azure monster.

The walls and ceilings are slightly convex, which adds to the surreal effect of the scheme, while a trio of fluid, teardrop-shaped pendant lights by Benjamin Hopf and Constantin Wortmann gives a further Daliesque twist.

Much of the furniture comes from Butenko’s own range, including wine-red Origami chairs, which are set around a simple white table in the smallest of the meeting rooms. Above the table, three black Silly-Kon pendant lights by Ingo Maurer hover like stylised birds.

Butenko also designed the comfortable blue sofa in the main meeting area and the black Blobby chairs, which have been paired with simple wooden desks in the private offices.

Surreal though it may be, the Azzure office never feels like a case of style over substance. Furniture has been chosen for practicality as well as to make bold statements. According to Makhno, the most successful thing about the scheme is the way it represents the company’s fun, almost eccentric, side on the one hand and its serious, business-like nature on the other.

‘Azure wanted the space to reflect the main characteristics of the company, which produces design accessories,’ says Makhno, ‘so the office interior communicates to both its employees and clients an interesting design concept told through two different stories.’

It’s this subtle interplay between synthetic materials such as Corian and natural ones, including nut wood, and between the bold, curving forms of Butenko’s furniture and the sober, straight lines of the desks, tables and storage units that really makes this scheme work.

This article was first published in fx Magazine.

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