‘A better way’: Incu HQ and Outlet

Thomas Edison once decreed, “There’s a way to do it better – find it.” True to this sentiment, when the founders of fashion brand Incu, Brian and Vincent Wu, were looking to integrate their head office and warehousing into one location, a long skinny site that was once home to a mechanic’s workshop in Sydney’s Rosebery stood out to them as a place where just such an opportunity seemed possible.

The brothers called upon their longstanding collaborator Kelvin Ho of Akin Atelier, who they had worked with for a number of years in developing Incu’s physical retail identity across a number of sites in Australia. To create Incu HQ, Ho and his team identified a key opportunity that the long narrow site presented – access from two ends, freeing the program up to keep the logistics of warehousing set at one end, enabling the other end to have a friendly street presence.

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The facade is composed of red dry pressed bricks crafted in a range of patterns and complex details, such as a rendered curve and brick-tiled soffits.

Image: Terence Chin

Despite a series of new retail and hospitality interventions taking place in the area, the majority of the existing surrounding industrial and commercial buildings lacked any meaningful exchange with the adjacent streets. The designers saw an opportunity to improve this situation, capitalizing on this urban arrangement with a new monochrome brick building form that is carved and shifted to create four distinct openings to simult-aneously address the street and serve the building within. Two doorways, the primary one being the entrance to the outlet store, are carved out of the red clay-coloured facade. Two larger openings flank the outlet door – one a large shopfront window, the other a gentle ramp that leads up to a stairway and lift foyer that is the entry to Incu HQ.

Typically an outlet store is rudimentary and somewhat generic in its fitout – raw concrete floors, bare walls, practical racks and shelving and exposed services are par for the course. In this instance, with the creation of a street presence, Incu and Akin Atelier sought to connect the outlet fitout with a “detuned” version of the language developed for their other stores – an “understated palette of raw materials in neutral tones.” Services are still exposed and the floor is concrete; however, the polished slab and the ceiling are painted white to present a cohesive palette that allows the timber joinery, the curved brick serving counter, and most importantly the clothing itself to be drawn to the foreground. These moves gently lift the outlet into a realm more attuned to high street than factory store.

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Detailed brickwork is a key materiality of the project, referencing the existing industrial brick sites of the Rosebery area.

Image: Terence Chin

That same palette of materials is cast across the HQ spaces. The soft earthshell brick slips utilized on the outlet store counter are reimagined as an external carpet to lead visitors from the street to the HQ front door. The stairwell, housed in a rendered masonry volume, features a curved corner that hovers out and over the front door.

Up above, the spaces of Incu HQ are bound together by a white circulation spine off which meeting spaces, brick-lined courtyards and offices are set. At one end of the spine, the open plan main office area nestles in, borrowing light from the open courtyard. At the other end, the circulation spine breaks out into an informal kitchen lounge, where a long kitchen table holds the centre of the room while an oak-lined kitchen skirts the edge and morphs into a breakout banquette seat.

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The raw concrete flooring is balanced with premium timber finishes, large windows and feature lighting.

Image: Terence Chin

The kitchen lounge, spine and main meeting room all open out to a brick sky terrace that sits above the street. The height of the brick balustrade screens out the street below while borrowing the flouncy brick parapet shapes of the old factory building across the road into its own composition.

Akin Atelier’s goal to create cohesion between stores has successfully been extended to include Incu’s entire operation. In doing so Incu has found a “better way” of working by combining outlet, warehousing and HQ into one entity with a public presence that enables them to operate more flexibly and efficiently. By investing in a meaningful working environment for its team, Incu has enabled its staff to work collaboratively, effectively and creatively together into the foreseeable future – something that is all the more important given the uncertain times we currently face.