With global giants ranging from Google to rap superstar Jay-Z as clients, architecture, interior design and engineering studio PENSON has enjoyed a meteoric rise to success since it was established a litttle more than eight years ago. ‘It’s been quite a thrilling ride,’ says founder Lee Penson, ‘and I’ve loved nearly every moment so far.’
When I meet him at his studio near Waterloo, Penson recalls the challenges involved in starting out as a small practice: ‘There’s a heap of challenges to resolve when you arrive with the ambition of creating a really cool new brand, one that will offer clients something different. There are many hurdles and sometimes people stand in your way, but the hardest thing is securing the opportunities to prove yourself. The only way to do that was to work twice as hard as your competitors.’
Penson has always had a strong work ethic, securing his chartered status through part-time education while working in practice for seven years. This underpinned his creative education with time in the commercial world. Penson says: ‘One reason PENSON exists today as a brand that’s going places is because of the way I did my "apprenticeship" as I call it.’
Graduating with a First, Penson was shortlisted for RIBA Bronze and Silver Medals, and was made partner at his first practice the day he qualified, at the age of 28. He says he learned a lot working with some leading studios, but he had always known he would go it alone; after just two years working in London, he felt ready to found PENSON. His first solo projects were bus stations – an area of our urban environment that could often use a designer’s touch but rarely gets it. The first was in Brighton in 2007 and dubbed ‘Brighton’s Time Machine’ by locals.
‘The client had been let down by another practice and it was a problem project,’ says Penson. ‘They needed something very special as a building to satisfy the planners, but they didn’t have the money for that. So the project was at a standstill for two years. We were invited to have a dabble and said, "Well, if we do this, then you as the planners can get what you want, and it would solve the budget problem, but you’d also have something really cool operationally." Nine weeks later we had secured planning with a unanimous committee vote and it was built at an incredibly low cost for a new building 32 weeks after that’.
Later that year Penson won, by public vote, the FX Award for International Breakthrough Talent. An wide variety of UK projects followed, covering new-build and interiors, more transport-related schemes, restaurants, bars and award-winning HQs.
Fast-forward to the present and Penson says the studio’s work has gone ‘properly global’. Current enquiries range in size from large projects such as an HQ in South Korea for 20,000 people, to what Penson calls ‘small, edgy projects that are very high profile indeed’.
‘We have projects in Australia, LA, New York and across Europe, the Middle East and Africa,’ he says. With its recent projects including offices for Google, PENSON the company aims at setting new standards in workplace design while at the other end of the scale is working on numerous sports stadia around the world, as well as nightclubs, bars, hotels and universities. Through it all PENSON has maintained its reputation as a studio that can turn its hand to almost any project, regardless of size or budget. Penson suggests that the studio is also increasingly in demand for its expertise in workplace design and strategy.
‘There is no excuse for providing employees with workplaces that are unattractive and uninspiring’, says Penson. ‘Even if you’ve a tiny budget and a tiny space with two desks, you can still do something that makes work a nicer experience. We spend more time at work than we spend having fun – well, some of us do – so workplaces in my book should reflect that. I spend a lot of time with new clients demonstrating how the more creative projects we’ve delivered have been the cheaper ones – so there’s no excuse for making a Ricky Gervais-style office.’
Ever since the studio’s first office project for Cisco at Heathrow, PENSON has demonstrated an aptitude for designing offices that don’t really look like offices. Does Penson think the ‘fun office’ is a fad, or is it here to stay? ‘Definitely, it’s here to stay,’ he says, ‘but I think that "fun" is the wrong word. If you say "fun" you think of an office with gimmicks like slides, and no one puts a slide in their office these days – it’s been done to death. It’s more about having a nice environment to work in, and having the tools you need to do that in spaces that work around the worker and not the other way round. It’s also about being commercial but also having snugs and social time merged with functional time. Good looks and a nice feel enhance these credentials, in the hands of a good designer.’
Seeing how far PENSON has come in such a short time, I can’t resist asking him if he has global domination in his sights, but his plans for the brand he has built turn out to be more restrained than that. ‘I’d like to see the business grow,’ he says, ‘but wisdom tells me to grow steadily, on a solid, deliverable base. We always want to offer a personal service and we want to keep PENSON at a size where we’re able to do that. So there’s no big ambition to take over the world, chasing turnover. PENSON is more about being a group of nice, level-headed but talented people, who don’t take themselves too seriously, but are brilliant at what they do.
‘We’re just going to keep on with the hard work while doing the right thing for our clients. I think that will be PENSON’s natural progression and it will go where ever it wants to go. I’m happy to follow.’
