Mallol Design House, an architecture firm headquarters that expresses a new working philosophy

Cooperation as the foundation for creativity and success in an architecture firm: the project for the Mallol Design House, the new headquarters of Mallol Arquitectos in Panama City, was developed in line with this working philosophy.

The building has work-spaces for more than 255 architects and was created by the clever restructuring of a seven-storey hotel in the city centre, not far from Panama Bay.

The project provides a succession of well lit, flexible, fluid, non-hierarchical spaces, designed to facilitate communication, collaboration and the creation of synergies between colleagues and clients.

Mallol Design House speaks a distinctively contemporary language, which reflects the style of the Panama firm's architectural creations: concrete, steel, glass, wood and stoneware are combined with mainly white interiors, for better lighting of the working areas.

The architects have also been provided with a roof-top swimming-pool, directly connected to a communal indoor room. To achieve the maximum continuity between indoors and outdoors, the same material was chosen for the floor of the large indoor room and the paving of the terrace: Marazzi Mystone Pietra di Vals porcelain stoneware.

Mystone Pietra di Vals is the perfect material for a project of this kind, with a contemporary, urban look. Inspired by the rarest quartzites, the collection creates the effect of stone on porcelain stoneware and is available in various sizes and surfaces suitable for both indoor and outdoor use.

In this project, in fact, the swimming-pool terrace was paved with Mystone Pietra di Vals in structured version 20 mm thick, perfect for heavily used zones and for creating an anti-slip surface.

To state the obvious: surely it must be everyone's dream to work in an office like this, where you can even have a dip in the pool surrounded by Panama City's skyscrapers between projects.

Ph. Fernando Alda