Banda Agency Offices – Kyiv

banda is one of Ukraine’s best-known advertising agencies, and it asked ater.architects for something other than an office: a space for people whose daily work is generating ideas, and a physical statement of how the agency thinks. The brief, in the studio’s telling, was for somewhere that felt less like a workplace than a large, bright apartment.

The 300 m² floor occupies the second storey of an early twentieth-century building on Yaroslaviv Val, in the historic centre of Kyiv. Load-bearing walls had already divided the plan into rooms; the architects left that structure legible, inserted two oak-clad cubes each carrying a mezzanine, and kept everything around them open. Stripping out the suspended ceilings uncovered original mouldings and friezes, which were restored and left to sit against an asymmetrical stainless-steel reception desk and a minimalist Luceplan pendant.

Furniture does much of the talking. Red Dietiker armchairs greet visitors beside a naive painting by Danik Manzhos; a leather sofa and armchairs by Eugen Schmidt for Soloform, hunted down through European dealers, anchor the hall; bent plywood chairs from the late 1980s line a twelve-seat communal table. Part of the hall lifts onto a podium that clears for presentations and can be curtained off from the rest.

Inside the cubes sit meeting rooms and Zoom rooms whose doors carry rounded glass panels borrowed from Kyiv trams, their interiors upholstered in shearling for quiet. Above one, reached by a steel pool ladder, the “cloud lounge” is lined floor and wall in sky-printed mats: a place to change your surroundings without leaving the building. The kitchen runs on a wavy stainless bar under Mario Bellini’s Nuvola lamp, and a workshop at the far end lines its wall with aluminium pegboard for prototyping, the agency’s awards hung among the tools.