Silver Fern Farms Offices – Dunedin
Unispace sought to enrich and energize a post-covid workplace for global food business, Silver Fern Farms, located in Dunedin, New Zealand
Silver Fern Farms is New Zealand’s leading marketer, producer, and procurer of premium grass-fed meat with operations in China, the US, the UK, and the Middle East.
Housed within a Category 2 heritage-listed building that was once Dunedin’s Central Post Office, the Silver Fern Farms hub needed to pay homage to the company’s rural roots in a fresh and dynamic way while supporting flexible, project-based work.
The Silver Fern Farms’ post-Covid workplace strategy is geared toward face-to-face collaboration. Working with a 0.7 desk sharing ratio, the new layout includes an ‘innovation’ zone with dedicated long and short-term project rooms. The ‘discover’ zone includes a digital terrace, connecting the Dunedin hub with Silver Fern Farm sites nationally and globally.
Previously held off-site, the tasting kitchen provides a space for in-house product development, cooking demonstrations, and marketing, and is also where Silver Fern Farms’ internal ‘MasterChef’ competition is live-streamed to its people across the globe.
Warmth is achieved within the heritage building through thoughtful layered materials giving new life to the base build architecture. Bringing the outside in, internal plantings fill the voids and moss green walls, a nod to their farmers, connecting the brand to the space.
The project was delivered in two stages with construction works restricted to business hours Monday to Saturday to avoid disruption to a hotelier occupying the upper floors of the building. Our Project and Site Management teams managed this successfully, with phase two works completed 10 days early with zero complaints from the building tenants.
Design: Unispace
Photography: David Straight
