RAY WHITE PAPAMOA
Sold! on a Better Brief
How this real estate team turned an under-utilised auction room into the hub of their business.
When the franchise owner first got in touch, the plan was pretty practical. They were taking over the tenancy directly below their existing auction room (previously a House of Travel franchise, all purple feature walls and destination murals), and the thinking was to move the sales team downstairs, keep the property managers across the road, and get a bit more breathing room in the process.
We’d done two refurbs for these guys previously, but this time the owner was keen to create “something new and different” So before we looked at layouts, we ran a briefing workshop with the whole team.
And what came out of it was really interesting.
The existing auction room/boardroom upstairs…
Taking up prime floor area, used for a few hours a week.
The downstairs tenancy they were taking over… someone else's brand, someone else's brief.
The original brief, and the real brief
The team had been working out of enclosed offices upstairs, siloed around the edges of the auction room, different teams barely crossing paths. A lot of people were defaulting to working from home - not because they preferred it, but because coming into the office just didn't offer them much. And almost nobody was bringing clients in, because the space wasn't somewhere you'd want to bring them.
Once we started asking what the space could actually do for the team - what would make them want to come in, and bring clients in, and properly use the office - the brief shifted.
The real priority wasn't more space. It was flexibility, connection, and a space that actually reflected the business they'd built.
The Auction Lounge
Every real estate office has an auction room. It's industry standard. Large footprint, formal seating, used for a few hours once a week, empty the rest of the time.
I floated a different idea: what if it wasn't an auction room at all, but a lounge?
A space that could reconfigure for auction day once a week - chairs in rows, projector running, Ray White branding in place - and otherwise function more like a Koru Lounge. Café-style seating. Touchdown tables. Informal meeting clusters. Somewhere agents could drop in between appointments, meet clients properly, and run into each other without having to book anything.
As with any project that pushes against industry convention, it took a few conversations to get everyone across the line. That's pretty normal, and honestly a good sign - if nobody's questioning the idea, the idea probably isn't interesting enough. Once the team could see that the space would still work for auction day (we weren't taking anything away, we were adding everything else), things moved quickly.
The rest of the space
Alongside the Auction Lounge, we designed phone booths - little colour-tinted jewel boxes tucked toward the back of the plan, so agents had somewhere to step away for private calls without leaving the floor.
Enclosed meeting rooms handle conversations that need more than a corner. And a proper kitchen gives the team somewhere they actually want to stop.
The design palette was drawn from the landscape just outside - sand dunes, ocean tones, plants cascading overhead the way they do in the dunes, ring pendant lights that make the ceiling feel generous instead of flat. A few pops of colour through the furniture nod to the sky at dawn and dusk.
It was really important that the space felt like Papamoa. Not just any office that happened to be near the beach. So we commissioned up and coming local artist Jasmine Kroeze to create 3 custom canvases for each of the meeting spaces, tying together the colour palette.
What I love most about this project isn't how it looked at handover. It's what keeps showing up on their Instagram. Yoga classes on a weekday morning with the whole team on their mats under the ring lights. Client events with platters and drinks and people clustered around the café tables. Training sessions. Award ceremonies. YouTube Q&As filmed on the lounge setting… check out some of their posts here.
And probably my favourite: the owner doing regular video walkthroughs of the space here.
“Three years down the track and we are still in love with our cosy coastal event space.”
“Our team love the new space and we RAVE about it. Bubble did a fantastic job and we constantly get great comments.”
The team has grown significantly since the fit-out, and the space has become part of how they tell their story. A room that once sat empty for most of the week is now the thing the whole business is built around.
BUBBLE INTERIORS’ SCOPE:
Strategic Briefing + Staff Engagement
Space Planning, Concept + Developed Design
All finishes selections
Documentation for Pricing + Construction
Negotiations with Landlord re contribution for Base Build Scope
Co-ordination of Tender Process + appointment of Contractor
Procurement of full new FF&E Package
“Soft” Project Management
PROJECT TEAM + SUPPLIERS:
Main Contractor: Total Fitouts
Flooring: Tretford
Furniture: Harrows, ISSA, Kovacs, Modern Office
Custom Artwork: Jasmine Kroeze
Planting: Theo Spargo
Photography: Jay Drew
Project Completed September 2021
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If you'd like to read more about why the briefing process is the most important part of any office project, I've written about it over on the Workspaces That Work Substack.