FASHION SENSE.

Witty and inventive, these offices for a fashion design company creatively recolonize a redundant industrial building.

Ted Baker (the company) is known for its witty, insouciant take on fashion and its new offices in London reflect the same iconoclastic spirit. Perhaps most iconoclastically of all, Ted Baker (the person) does not actually exist, but has been willed into life by collective imagination to act as a guiding presence and creative influence. 'What would Ted think?' is the corporate mantra.

The company needed new premises that combined a conventional mixture of offices, meeting rooms, showrooms and a staff canteen, but these also had to reflect the underlying informal philosophy. An old post office building on the edge of Regent's Canal in north London promised the required amount of space, but both the raw material and setting were uninspiring. Built in the early 1980s, the four-storey industrial unit was arranged around a bleak triangular courtyard, joining an array of similarly dull sheds in a dreary Camden backstreet.

Matthew Priestman was commissioned to remodel the Ugly Brown Building (as it has come to be known, in the argot of taxi drivers), a task achieved with some skill and flair. The exterior remains largely unaltered (the brown cladding and red window frames are now almost ironically fashionable again), but the inside has been remarkably transformed. Entry is audaciously signposted by a huge billboard of a lobster, an instant graphic landmark in the featureless street. The route to the upper levels is animated by a linear history of Ted Baker graphics and small products. Existing industrial lift cages grind up to the reception space on the third floor, where the scope of Priestman's new interventions is spectacularly revealed.

The hitherto inaccessible central courtyard has been covered by a steel-framed, clear glass roof adding space and light in one bold, economical sweep. Configured around the revived triangular courtyard, second and third floors are conceived as large open plan areas where various events take place -- showrooms, workstations, formal and informal meeting rooms. At the apex of the triangle, a tautly detailed stair leads down from the office level to the lower floor. The staff canteen occupies the centre of the courtyard, surrounded by banks of showrooms enclosed by sliding canvas and stainless-steel screens. On the elevation overlooking the canal, the original cladding has been removed and replaced with glazed sliding doors that lead on to cedar-clad balconies. In an essentially hermetic, inward-looking environment, this provides some welcome contact with the outside world.

Throughout, the treatment is vigorously broad brush, expressing the industrial spirit of the building. The original interior has been stripped back to its bare shell and the exposed structure sandblasted. Finishes are colourful, inventive and robustly functional -- the existing concrete floor screed has simply been sealed, with traces of the original floor surfaces and partitions still faintly visible. Desks are large linoleum and walnut-clad tables with a bespoke modular storage system. Services are routed from the ceiling or perimeter walls, so that work spaces can be adapted to individual needs, giving increased flexibility. Cellular external meeting rooms are each lent a theatrical character by judicious use of props and photographic murals. Internal meeting spaces are housed in a series of sleek pods. Quirky, yet with an inventive approach to materials and space handling, Priestman's makeover cleverly crystallizes what makes the company tick. What would Ted think? We think he'd like it.