A Partnership Built for Growth
We've worked with Steven Bartlett before. It started with Social Chain in Manchester, a blue slide, a ball pool, and a brief that asked us to make a workplace feel like somewhere young people actually wanted to be. That project taught us a lot about what Steven builds and how he builds it: fast, with conviction, and always with one eye on what nobody else has done yet.
So when the brief landed for a new London headquarters, we understood the ambition before the conversation had even started.
Multi-enterprise. One Culture
The brief was genuinely complex. A single site in Shoreditch needed to house Flightstory, Steven.com, and The Diary of a CEO, distinct operations with different audiences, different rhythms, and different spatial needs, alongside a podcast studio reaching tens of millions of listeners, a venture portfolio office, and a growing creator community. All under one roof. All at once. At speed.
The risk was clear: avoid creating a place that tried to serve everyone and felt like it belonged to no-one, or one that stopped being fit for purpose within a year. The design had to deliver a coherent place, connected by common values and ambitions.
An Organising Thought
The media company is called Flightstory. The answer was already in the name.
Not as a theme. Not as a decorative gesture. As a positioning idea that could structure every decision, spatial, material, experiential, from the entrance to the rooftop. We committed to it fully, and everything followed from there.
Flight gave us a framework for a flow though zones through the building, each with their own character while telling one story. It gave us a language for materiality, for movement, for the kind of details that make visitors stop and understand where they are.
Aiming for the Starts
The centrepiece of the events zone is a 25-foot fabricated space rocket. Full scale. Impossible to walk past. The kind of object that is completely absurd and completely inevitable at the same time. Brand theatre and a powerful symbol of the company's ambition to break new ground.
The events zone flexes. It can host a podcast audience one evening, a founders' dinner or creator community gathering the next. The social spaces are built for collision and serendipity whereas the studios are built for privacy and performance.
Then come the details that express the identity further. Meetings happen on aircraft seats. Zoom pods in space capsules, self-contained, focused, stripped of distraction. Bespoke room signage that are a nod to a range of pioneers in the fields of business, technology and culture.
The HQ is now the operational and cultural anchor for one of the most-watched media businesses in the world. The studios run daily. The events space is the social glue connecting the businesses together. Guests arrive, understand immediately where they are, and leave with something to say about it.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A space that people talk about unprompted is doing marketing no budget can buy. The building has become part of the story Steven is telling about himself and his business, and it's telling it 24 hours a day, to everyone who walks through the door.
This is what we're trying to do every time. Not just solve a brief, but build something that keeps working long after we've left the building. The best workplaces don't just house a business. They express it, amplify it, and outlast any single campaign.
This one does all three. And knowing Steven, it's only partway through its story.
