Electric Dreams Takes On A Fabric Giant!

Together, Catharina Frankander and Joel Degermark are the dynamic design duo behind Swedish based firm Electric Dreams. The team could not have picked a more perfect name for their firm. In essence, Electric Dreams describes the youthful and playful elements incorporated into their exaggerated designs. Frankander and Degermark tell a different story in every project, each as gripping as the last.

Their most recent project is titled ‘Fabricville,’ the headquarter offices for Fabric Retail Glbl in Gothenburg, Sweden. Electric Dreams approached the design with the idea that a busy company headquarters is much like a little working village. The ‘little village’ concept is the result of what you see in the design. Long corridors resemble streets lined with gingerbread-esque offices with windows and doors, and connote the feeling of walking down the small roads of a quaint town.

We caught up with lead designer Catharina Frankander for some Q & A where explained a little more about how the design of Fabricville was executed:

Knstrct: What was your inspiration for this design?
CF: The inspiration behind this design was the idea that a busy company headquarters is very much like a little village – it gathers many types of occupations, each with different spatial requirements, and many different sorts of activities are going on at different times. Open public as well as private enclosed spaces are needed, work places as well as recreational spaces. The aesthetic is very much inspired by traditional Swedish wooden cottages.

Knstrct: Did you face any design challenges?
CF: The office was originally divided up in several offices with different tenants, then it was all clashed together to form the 3-floor, 1500 sqm
Fabricville office. The space bore traces of several different, conflicting renovating schemes…some from the 80s, some from late 90s…The space
had endless dull corridors with a mishmash of window and door types, and lots of different ceiling heights. The space was difficult to navigate since everything looked pretty much the same anywhere where you went.

Knstrct: What was your design goal?
CF: The Fabricville concept came about as a way to turn all the space’s shortcomings into an advantage. The three-floor office was to house 150 employees for Fabric Retail, Weekday and Monki: an interesting mix of fashion designers, buyers, construction managers, and PR people. Our wish was to bring it all together in one visual identity, to house a family of fashion brands, each with its own different personality.

In the Fabricville office, the long narrow corridors became a busy village street, with workshop buildings for the clothes designers, office
buildings for the marketing people, and brightly coloured cottages for conference rooms. The main street is lined with laser cut MDF hedges on each side. The canteen is the green park in the middle. Each floor has a different color scheme to match the identity of the brand that is sitting there. This project was done in collaboration with our brilliant colleagues from Fabric Retail, Sarah Otley and Rong Guan.

(Photographs Provided By Electric Dreams)