According to one of its founders, design consultancy Heirloom was launched to create things that are “worth keeping and worth loving”. To inspire the team to do just that, they built a workspace that flips traditional office-layout logic on its head. The result is a studio that is wonderfully peculiar and packed with personality
As you step into the design consultancy Heirloom’s studio in Mile End, east London, the first thing you notice is the huge workshop table in the centre of the room, its irregularly shaped, pastel-pink tabletop covered in cutting mats, clay and cardboard prototypes. It makes a dramatic first impression – and, of course, that’s exactly the point. “Classically, workshops are hidden in the back of design offices,” says co-founder Jack Godfrey Wood. “We felt strongly that we should all walk into the workshop every day and have the opportunity to make something and see things being made.”
Heirloom was founded three years ago by Wood and three other partners – Harc Lee, Andy Furner and Tate Sager. Wood had known and worked with the others throughout his career, and each had already achieved success in their respective fields when he picked up the phone. “We had all got to the same point of looking around and thinking, we’ve done loads of work, won awards, had a lot of sales – but not done anything that we’re super proud of,” he says. Today, the multidisciplinary team is spread across London, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and works across a range of products, from office furniture to consumer technology, via digital interfaces and even medical devices.
The name Heirloom was chosen because it reflects the type of objects and the kind of experience the team wants to create. By way of explanation, Wood holds up his MacBook. “I have profound respect for the quality of this object, but I have no love for it,” he says, noting that if it broke tomorrow, he would simply replace it and think no more of it. For him, a heirloom is “something worth keeping and worth loving”. Harc Lee nods in agreement. “I’ve been in this industry a while,” he says, “and I’m so bored with typical industrial design. It’s always missing some weirdness, some personal connection. The word ‘heirloom’ is weird, but very personal.” On the company’s website are portraits of the team holding up their own heirlooms, from an emu egg to a butter dish: a wonderfully bizarre and personal collection.
They didn’t work with any other agency on the fit-out, instead opting to design all the furniture for the space themselves (apart from a rug and an Aram sofa upstairs). The stand-up meeting table at the top of the staircase is one surprising result. It was dreamt up by two of Heirloom’s designers, Ben Moore and Jan Rose, and features a tabletop supported by several stalagmite-like organic shapes. “People sit at it and they stroke the blobby shapes,” says Wood. “It’s a lovely little tactile, human moment.”
Lee designed a modular shelving unit that runs almost the entire length of the space upstairs. Every inch is taken up by objects – some are finished, delivered projects; many more are rough experiments in clay or 3D-printed prototypes. “We’ve specifically displayed the parts of projects that we liked, not just the parts that got made,” says Wood. Here you find an initial exploration that eventually became a Bluetooth speaker which is due to be released soon; there you see an early prototype of a medical device that in years to come could make brain surgery far safer.
The desks are placed right at the back of the second-storey space, meaning the Heirloom team has to walk past the display before starting work each day. The intention is to spark inspiration, ignite conversations and, as Wood notes with a smile, influence the team’s work through Derren Brown-esque subliminal messaging. “The goal is to surround ourselves with the things we want to do,” he says. “That way, we remind ourselves to hold on to the dream.”
Photography by Studio Rochowski
This story was originally featured in OnOffice 171, Summer 2025. Discover similar stories by subscribing to our weekly newsletter here
