Inspired by the built-in, unspoken protocols of the beloved British campground, Campers&Dens take office pods way beyond the next level.
Mark Partridge and the design team at Orangebox have set their sights on intuitive spaces—where the physical environment itself intuitively dictates expected behaviour. It’s design thinking at work! And at Furnify, we love design thinking.
Campers&Dens is an interior architecture solution that encourages employees to minimise interruptions, collaborate efficiently, and respect each other’s different working styles.
Designer Mark Partridge says, “Campers&Dens is a complete reinvention of built-environment interior architecture. And that architecture must extend beyond the pods—from fully enclosed to semi-open to fully open—to capture those layers of privacy.”
Mimicking a campsite, he explains: “When you’re inside your campervan and the doors are closed, it’s do not disturb. When you’re outside in your awning with your cup of tea or your coffee, you’re still in your own space, in your own domain, and it’s kind of invitation-only. You’re still in a private space. And then when you’re outside in the open field, then it becomes a sort of free-for-all where people can come up and talk to you.”
To achieve these layers of privacy in the office, the Campers&Dens product suite consists of 83 variants, including Campers Meeting Pods, kinks, cabins, awnings, hacking frames, slats, and designer fabrics.
It’s Time to Hack Your Office with Campers&Dens
“The fact is, it’s arrogant of us to want our office pods to look like ours in every client space... We want clients to make them look like theirs... to make them unique every time,” says Mark.
The designers of Campers&Dens Pods have a vision far bigger than mere office pods or phone booths. Everything can be adapted. Finishes, hacks, fabrics and entire sections can be swapped out, moved, or removed easily. You can even demount and move the modular system to another part of your building.
Flexibility is key.
The main building blocks of Campers&Dens are Campers meeting pods, awnings, cabins, and kinks.
Campers&Dens Pods
Pods are fully enclosed, room-in-room private spaces where employees can focus or hold confidential meetings in peace.
Campers&Dens Cabins
Cabins extend from the pod’s exterior with integrated seats, benches, and tables to create an in-between nook for huddles. To make these spaces even more inviting, adding comfortable seating such as the Bond Armchair can be a great option.
Campers&Dens Awnings
Awnings are semi-open arches attached to the pod, creating small collaborative meeting places or informal work areas that still suggest you might need to ask permission to join.
Campers&Dens Kinks
Kinks are an architectural flourish that gives your pod the feel of “an outdoor cabin or cabana,” according to the designers.
Mix, Match, Customise
Each of these main building blocks is incredibly customisable. Pod walls come in glass, acoustic fabric panels, whiteboards, or various laminates.
Awnings offer stretched fabric options in a range of colours and patterns, or you can choose coloured paracord for a simple statement. Birch plywood or polyester felt slats can create a more substantial division.
Evenly distributed wooden-slat “hacking frames” that hook onto the outside of the pod can create endless textures while reducing visual distractions. Stretching fabrics over the ribs allows for even more intricate and unique visual variations.
“It’s our task to deliver solutions to help you encourage everyone back to the new workplace, which will, we believe, be much more focused on collaboration and social connection... creating destinations... places you want to be in rather than places you have to be in,” the Orangebox team revealed during their product launch.
Ventilation for That Outdoors Feeling—Indoors
If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from that-thing-no-one-talks-about, it’s that stale air and poor ventilation are how people get sick. That applies to many airborne respiratory viruses too.
Great ventilation comes standard with Campers&Dens. An integrated refresh button on the pod’s control panel pops the roof open 20 degrees and boosts ventilation to full for one minute.
It’s a smart solution to expel stale air between meetings—or right in the middle of a meeting that’s getting a bit stuffy. With Campers&Dens, the air is so fresh it’s almost like camping in the great outdoors.