Workspace: Dake Wells Architecture

Dake Wells Architecture has an extra-large calling card: the boxlike conference room that dominates the firm’s studio. The box’s bold orange exterior and self-contained geometry reflect the firm’s taste for “sweet and sour relationships between a space and the things that are inserted in it,” says partner Andrew Wells, FAIA, LEED AP. Wells and partner Brandon Dake, AIA, LEED AP, built the box in 2007, when they renovated the studio, which occupies a full floor of a 1910 downtown commercial building. “Funds were limited—$10 a foot—so we built only one enclosed space,” Wells says. The box’s back wall is lined with tackable polyethylene, “and the side walls are dry-erase surfaces,” he says. “We can project images on them and draw on the projected images.” While an eminently practical space, the enclosure is equally important as a design statement, Wells says. “It’s a tool we use in a lot of our projects, and clients pick up on that when they come in.”