Google has unveiled an office for its engineering staff, which would put all other serviced offices in London to shame.
Hidden inside a traditional building, the third floor of the search engine’s office in Victoria, is a haven of breakout spaces and speciality coffee.
As well as the creature comforts, the office is an incredibly creative place, with every wall acting as a white board, well perhaps that’s what you expect when you allow some of the world’s best engineering minds to design their own office.
Some companies have sessions where they listen to their staff and even implement a few of these changes round and about, but Google enlisted Henrique Penha, lead designer of Android to head up the project.
Mr Penha said: “Making it feel like it’s not an office was part of the brief. The meeting rooms have sofas, making them more laidback. Forcing people to sit differently can help them to think differently.”
One of the most unusual aspects of this highly original office is the indoor park which has been created, complete with rowing boats, where staff can sit and eat their lunch.
It is also quite out of the ordinary for office spaces to have their own coffee blends, though the Google office has four, with staff being specially trained on the state-of-the-art machines to supply themselves with the perfect caffeine fix.
David Singleton, engineering director of Google UK, said: “Google has always believed that inspiring environments create inspired ideas. Our engineers come up with these brilliant ideas, so we figured they’d want to design their perfect office space.”
Google has been in existence since 1996, when it was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were students at Stanford University in California.
In May this year it surpassed the one billion unique users mark and the term googling has entered into accepted vocabulary.
