Mother Tongue

Since its founding in 1996, creative agency Mother has always liked to do things differently, and its move from Soho to Shoreditch in 2004 heralded a geographic shift in where the media industries typically laid down roots, with the centre of town no longer the automatic choice. “Shoreditch wasn’t about pounds per square foot, it was us saying, from here, you can see further,” partner Robert Saville told Campaign magazine in 2006 on the occasion of Mother’s 10th birthday. So when the ground floor of its former warehouse HQ, Redchurch Street’s Biscuit Building, needed a refresh, design practice Holloway Li was charged with not messing with Mother’s already strong brand DNA, while at the same time reimagining the tired space to make it fit for purpose.

The Biscuit Building was originally part of a conglomeration of warehouses belonging to tea company Lipton (it was a tea-packing warehouse for most of its life, despite the name). Now, its ground floor is where Mother welcomes visitors, but it’s also an events space, sometimes welcoming in the public for a performance or an exhibition. “It’s a shopfront. And [Mother] want that shopfront to feel interesting, welcoming, but also impactful,” explains Alex Holloway, creative director and co-founder of Holloway Li with Na Li.

“It has wear to a number of hats. First and foremost it’s about staff welfare – everyone has breakfast and lunch here – but it’s also where they do a lot of activation and outreach. Mother famously started around a kitchen table, and that idea of community is still a big part of the story, and very important to them.”

After a number of years, the furnishings – including rows of red tables where 300 staff met and ate – and large communal kitchen were coming to the end of their life, but there were also opportunities to make some improvements to how everything functioned. “The idea of having this domestic kitchen that everyone circles around, and the dining tables, they are all core to how they want their team to interact,” says Holloway.

The old tables did a great job at breakfast and lunch, but were cumbersome to move around for events, so Holloway Li worked with longstanding collaborator Uma to create new iterations that were lightweight enough for two people to easily shift, but strong enough for dancing on at the Christmas party. Made from structural foam and fibreglass, encased in glossy red resin, Holloway says “it was quite detailed product design difficult to get right – we went through a number of failed attempts.” The existing reception desk has been reclad in a 4.5m-long sheet of fibreglass (made possible by Uma’s speciality in the automotive industry), but also lowered to create a more welcoming feel, and a red curtain now hangs behind it, adding a touch of theatricality as well as a functional, acoustic-dampening purpose.

The industrial architecture meeting the cosy domesticity that is part of Mother’s brand identity – the ‘kitchen table’ analogy, and the wall of gilt-framed portraits in the space that depict all the employees’ mothers – has been carried through to the new kitchen. “It’s a hybrid between a commercial and a domestic kitchen. It needed to quickly serve 300 people, but also be somewhere people can come and go throughout the day, make a cup of tea or introduce a new client,” says Holloway. Stainless steel cabinetry, shelving a worktops are softened by forest green cupboard fronts. One large island has been replaced by two smaller ones, to improve circulation.

A mezzanine level provides informal seating areas, populated with Holloway Li’s T4 modular seating (also developed with Uma) in a juicy shades of pink and orange. New red coffee tables have been refashioned from the previous benches. The T4 was originally inspired by the early-noughties chatshow sofa, so it seemed fitting to include them in the HQ of an agency born in the 1990s and intrinsically associated with the TV of the time (Mother was founded on the promise of its first client, Channel Five, which launched in 1997).

Shoreditch has changed beyond belief since Mother moved in in 2004, with the formerly run-down Redchurch Street now one of London’s most interesting independent shopping streets, attracting high-end international brands such as APC and Reformation; while the wider neighbourhood has seen edgier venues cleared away and replaced by new-build upmarket hotels and office blocks. Mother’s presence throughout is somehow reassuring. And its space has now been reframed, ready for the next few years’ worth of idiosyncratic creative thinking. “The brief was ‘we love our space and we wouldn’t really change much.’ They wanted continuity,” says Holloway. “It needed to feel like Mother – relaxed and not taking itself too seriously. Still humble, and a bit rough around the edges.”