Plywood Reception Desk

Fred Perry head office James Street Covent Garden

Created and designed by Amr Assid of Architects Buckley Gray Yeoman.

His brief was to fill an entrance area with a logo seating area, and reception desk.

This is his solution.


	We assembled the desk at our site to check it was OK Also we needed to know the actual length. The planned length was 405 parts x 18mm totaling 7.29 metre's We expected a difference due to the variance in the thickness of the plywood. The actual assembled length was approx 120 mm short. We put some extra sections onto the desk end to make up some of the difference. My biggest worry was if the board was 0.5mm over size as this would have made us 200mm over size , and taken us 50mm beyond the glass, and into the street.

	View from James Street
	Full rear view of the reception desk.
	Sanding was a major part of this job. One of the key elements was the hand sanding of 1,800 metre's of plywood edge. All edges were lacquered 3 times meaning we sanded over 5,000 of edge plus the surfaces. We used a high spec white based lacquer. We lacquered all the panels before assembly.
	Detail of seating area
	We used over 70 10' x 5' sheets of 18mm birch plywood. The desk weighs over 2.5 tonnes.
	Back view of desk area.
	Routing plywood panels on our large 3.2 metre x 1.6 metre CNC router. The holes in the panels are for dowel location.
	Wreath end with white leafs. The client choose to finish the leafs in clear lacquer.
	Desk panels on end prior to assemble
	Rear view of reception desk.
	Wreath from the rear sadly this view cannot now be seen as it's against the wall.
	Sketch made by Amr's during first site visit.
	Amr's Assaad concept model created on Rhino3D Its worth mentioning that we liaised with Amr in the early stages about what we required for the CAD file. Amr started with a clean continuous single surface.
	Rendering of wreath detail window end of reception desk.
	View through a dirty window