Resene Total Col­our Awards

Paul Leuschke of Leuschke Kahn Archi­tects last night picked up the first ever 'Resene Total Col­our Mas­ter – Night­in­gale Award' for his design work for Grant Thornton Account­ants, Auck­land. ProDesign ran a story on this pro­ject (Account­ing 4 Taste) in issue 100, and now online, below. Words: Anthony Coates. Pho­tos: Kal­lan MacLeod. You can find a full list of award win­ners here.

‘Account­ant’ and ‘archi­tect’ may be close together on an alpha­bet­ical list of careers in your school guid­ance counsellor’s office, but in the reduc­tion­ist world of small-minded ste­reo­typ­ing where I spend most of my time, they couldn’t be any fur­ther apart.

Think archi­tect, and you might ima­gine a man in his mid-40s in a New York loft-style office. He sips a short black and looks like he is wait­ing to record a Nivea for Men com­mer­cial. There is a gap on his black-rimmed spec­tacles where the brand should be, because the fash­ion house they’re from is too exclus­ive for you to have even heard of. But think account­ant, and you con­jure a pal­lid ecto­morph in a short-sleeved busi­ness shirt. His clammy palm re-adheres a dis­obedi­ent comb-over to his scalp as he pores over a stack of papers. He is work­ing late and his wife is out with another man.

These are of course cari­ca­tures, but a healthy dose of cool for mod­ern account­ancy firms like Grant Thornton can’t hurt to ban­ish this unfor­tu­nate repu­ta­tion and attract tal­en­ted young gradu­ates. Enter Paul Leuschke from Leuschke Kahn Architects.

As soon as Leuschke and I step out of the lifts at Grant Thornton’s Auck­land offices it’s clear the cuck­old from my vis­ion is a relic. The recep­tion dis­plays the dynamic-purple Grant Thornton logo and I feel a sud­den jolt of recog­ni­tion as I real­ise the recep­tion­ist is the ‘woman in a gigantic bathtub’ my horo­scope said I would encounter that day. The tub-shaped desk is dar­ing for an account­ancy firm, but seems appro­pri­ate for the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate – nearly all busi­nesses are tak­ing a bath, and if yours is, you might just find your­self at this very recep­tion desk for an audit of your practices.

The col­our scheme in the lobby is intriguing. The wooden wall pan­els are painted a mix of rusty oranges, yel­lows and browns and emboldened by the lib­eral applic­a­tion of shel­lac fur­niture pol­ish. The concept behind the 51 pan­els was the "we see things dif­fer­ently" cam­paign out of Auck­land ad agency Tequila, which used clever typo­graphy to turn num­bers into let­ters. Archi­tect Paul Leuschke had taken Tequila’s ori­ginal idea and brought it to the big screen, as it were, enlist­ing the col­our palette and some­time sign writ­ing of Auck­land abstract artist Richard Adams. Adams sat down with Wayne Pick, the art dir­ector from the ori­ginal ads, and set about com­ing up with a design for the wall. The scale of the task might be hard to grasp from the pho­tos, but the four months it took from con­cep­tion to com­ple­tion should be test­a­ment enough.

The end res­ult though, is stun­ning. The rich, dark hues impart the requis­ite sobri­ety of an account­ancy firm that must live or die by its repu­ta­tion in the mar­ket­place. Then some­how, the play­ful applic­a­tion of glossy oranges and yel­lows quietly reminds you where you are. You’re not in a high-rise mauso­leum with a name like Ham­mer­stein, Roth­schild & Trot­ter on the door. And you’re not in the land of per­petual adoles­cence you’d find in a hip ad agency (or ideas shop, or whatever it is they call them­selves nowadays). You’re some­where in between: a place where decorum and décor exist in equal meas­ures; a place where they find the bal­ance between being good with num­bers and simply being a number.

Leuschke and I explore the meet­ing rooms behind the bathtub. He describes the logist­ical fea­tures as I admire the view of the oak trees in Vic­toria Park. There is a side entrance so staff don’t have to walk through recep­tion en route to meet­ings, and each meet­ing room has a dif­fer­ing level of form­al­ity to suit dif­fer­ent cli­ents and situ­ations. Back in the wait­ing area, Paul points out that the fur­niture has been selec­ted and arranged in a sim­ilar fash­ion to the meet­ing rooms – each of the three 'chair­scapes' rep­res­ent low, medium and high levels of form­al­ity. A vis­itor is bound to feel at ease when given that degree of flex­ib­il­ity. I’m keen to try out the nearby cof­fee machine, which looks cap­able of time travel in the right hands, but alas, duty calls.

Behind the scenes, the theme of flex­ib­il­ity and see­ing things dif­fer­ently con­tin­ues. The main board­room has an impress­ive multi-media centre sus­pen­ded from the high stud. Along the walls are car­toon draw­ings of each part­ner, cruelly high­light­ing their vari­ous and numer­ous imper­fec­tions. Leuschke tells me it’s a com­pany tra­di­tion to keep new part­ners’ feet on the ground. I am begin­ning to warm to the place and regret not tak­ing my CA exams or, for that mat­ter, even a sol­it­ary account­ing paper.

The big screen in the staff cafet­eria shows a European Cham­pi­ons League game, even though no one appears to be watch­ing. Another one of the time-travelling cof­fee machines sits expens­ively on the counter wait­ing for someone to acci­dent­ally punch in the coordin­ates to 1985 and plum­met four floors to a bloody death for lack of a build­ing to sup­port them. A long line of bi-fold doors turns the café into a cater­ing hub for func­tions held in the adja­cent sem­inar room. A cir­cu­lar mech­an­ism that looks like some­thing for get­ting water out of a fire hydrant turns out to be a key for unlock­ing the line of doors. I com­ment on the lay­out of the office space and Leuschke replies mod­estly, “It’s all quite logical really. But of course it’s a logic that takes about two or three months to dis­cover.”
We move down the hall­way past pieces of paro­chial sport­ing mem­or­ab­ilia. A signed photo of Zin­zan Brooke is made out to the good people at the more ver­nacu­lar Brown, Wool­ley, Gra­ham – Grant Thornton New Zealand’s former incarn­a­tion. As we head for the lifts, I can’t help but won­der – des­pite the sleek work­place and state-of-the-art espresso facil­it­ies – if it's because Grant Thornton has never lost its essen­tial empathy for New Zea­l­and busi­nesses – its Brown­wooley­gra­ham­ness – that it really sees things differently.

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