From the architect:

In the heart of Sydney on Gadigal Country, Central Connect is an incubator for technology.

Innovative, flexible and social, this infrastructure tech giant’s new hub is a model for the future workplace.

Strategically designed as both a statement and a central meeting place, it offers an easily accessible third space for staff and clients from across the city.

Navigating a landscape punctuated by global tech innovators, the team at Central Connect recognised the imperative for a workplace that not only functions but inspires.

Their ambition? To create a place that fosters pride and attracts the very best talent — a workplace, quite simply, worth talking about.

The welcoming clubhouse design — developed in collaboration with the company’s internal workplace strategy team — caters to different personas, work styles and social preferences, nurturing a flattened hierarchy that unites employees at all levels. With highly flexible, moveable interiors, it’s a resilient, adaptable workplace that can transform to suit changing business needs.

Central Connect spans 2,400sqm with three zones across a single floor to support a variety of activities. With an event space, meeting and workshop rooms, lounges, and a café, the hub’s first area is for socialising, collaborating, and meeting. Visitors arrive here, are greeted by the concierge team, and enter a space that showcases the purpose, technology and products created by the organisation.

The middle zone functions as a shared coworking space for all employees with work lounges, meeting areas, drop-in workspaces, focus rooms for video calls, and an 80-person town hall space. Equipped with occupancy sensors and accessed via an online booking system, it’s ideal for inter-office meetings or as a temporary workspace between city appointments.

The final zone serves as a permanent home for an internal specialist start-up team — as opposed to a drop-in space like the rest of the office. Working in sprints, the staff needed social settings rather than individual desks, so this area was designed around their unique work patterns, which are quite different to the rest of the organisation.

It features project rooms, specialist equipment zones, various open and enclosed meeting spaces, stand-up huddles, and 24 unassigned desks following an activity-based workplace model. These are the only traditional desks in the office, creating an unusually low desk density with one workstation per 100sqm, compared to the typical office ratio of one per 10 to 15sqm.

The benefits of the clubhouse model embraced by Central Connect are supported by the findings of The Big Calm, our 2024 Workplace Futures Survey. Drawn from the responses of office workers across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, and the US, it found people desired workplaces that offer flexibility and freedom with varied office spaces that enable quiet focus and promote productivity.

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