Quirk At Work

Simplicity and minimalism, animated with primary colours. Art decoinspired motifs and eye-catching patterns. Presenting Studio Bipolar’s refreshingly different take on workspace design, while creating an administrative office for Esquire’s branded nightclub in New Delhi.

- Rupali Sebastian

Esquire. The name, the brand, needs no introduction. The magazine, after all, has been the industry’s most exclusive boy’s club since its debut in 1933. The 85-year-old product has seen its fair amount of upheavals and changes, with 13 editors trying to define its founding mission: “to be the common denominator of masculine interests.” Jay Fielden, its present editor, in an interview to the NY Times said his version “is aimed at a reader who’s an upstart, an iconoclast, an independent thinker, the most charming guy in the room.” A character pretty much architects Ujjwal Sagar and Sanjana Mathur of Gurugram-based Studio Bipolar strove towards when they were entrusted with the task of designing an administrative office to manage the brand’s nightclub in New Delhi.

“Esquire is a brand that stands for the sophisticated stylish yet intellectual modern man. The ideology we adopted was to design a space that would cater to the functional needs of the office, have a sophisticated ambience; yet achieve it in a quirky way. The concept we followed was of ‘sophisticated madness’,” say the architects. “The client wanted it to be a space where he could bring investors and they would immediately understand the brand and the ideology of the nightclub they were trying to sell. He, in fact, shared a branding docket for the nightclub with us so that we could understand its vibe before designing.”