Take A Virtual Tour of Envato’s Melbourne HQ
See behind the scenes of Envato's head office in the heard of the Melbourne CBD.
By Envato
Photos by John Marmaras, Devika Bilimoria and Josh Janssen.
Welcome, step inside and take a seat … actually, before you sit down, let me show you around. This is our new Envato headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. Situated in Melbourne’s central business district, on King St, home to a weird mix of big corporate buildings, delicious Japanese food and *ahem* gentlemen’s clubs!
Before we moved in, this three-story heritage building was used as a school. Going back even further, the building was a storage facility for Ferguson’s Winery. Now there’s less wine and more developers, computer screens and agile boards.
This is the top floor where our Envato Marketplaces and Envato Studio teams do their magic. It’s home to tall vaulted ceilings with skylights peppered throughout, original brickwork and beautiful copper pipes that sound like babbling brooks on a rainy day.
The Characters On The Walls
It was important to us that we made the building our own home. So we asked local street artist GhostPatrol to give the place a little character. With a simple brief – make the place awesome – we got these beautiful, graphic pieces throughout the building.
Because our offices used to be a school we inherited two auditorium-like rooms. Pictured here is the Nashville auditorium where our All Hands company meetings, team training, and community events are held.
A Team That Eats Together…
With over a hundred staff at HQ, it’s become increasingly critical to have spaces to get together. Our lunch room, home to a pool table, piano and space invaders table, opens up to our courtyard outdoors.
On a sunny Melbourne day, nothing beats eating lunch outside, followed by a fun game of kick to kick. During netball season, you’ll often see some of the team practising their shooting too. Peter from legal has a trick shot where he can bounce the ball from the wall into the ring. He has only managed to do it once.
The Tree That Connects Us All
Throughout the new offices are large ‘pods’ made of rings of beautiful wooden beams that serve as informal meeting spaces and quiet areas for working on a laptop.
From The Architects
Our architects Buro took the building, Envato’s values and ethos, and translated it all into beautiful and functional uses for the space. One of the most important considerations was keeping a connection between the three-floor split for the team.
“How do we make you aware that there is someone above you and that there is someone below you and that they are all part of your family and that you are all working together?”
The pods represent a tree that goes from the ground floor to the top floor. It acts as a visual connection, reminding everyone in the building that you are all in the one space and that down the trunk of the tree, there are others that you work with.
“We wanted it to really feel like the roots and the trunk and the branches, not that there was a hierarchy, as such, but there was something going through and connecting all of the things together.”
Our Rooms Have Names
Although we have a great space here in Melbourne, Australia, we also have close to a hundred staff members working around the world. Our Melbourne meeting rooms are a nice reminder of our truly global company. Each meeting room has a name, reflecting some of the locations of our remote staff. It’s not uncommon to start your day in a meeting in Hong Kong and finish watching a presentation in Manchester.
Thanks for coming to visit our new Envato home! A variety of Melbourne tech and community events are hosted here, so we hope in the future you’ll stop in for one of them and see the place up close and in person!
This post was originally written by Josh Janssen.