Second Home London Fields: new East End workspace echoes Sixties vibe – with Thunderbirds style interiors and plants

London Fields has suddenly emerged as one of London’s grooviest quarters. The effect was sparked by the arrival of the Overground in 2007 and has been building ever since.

Exit one side of the station and the lush green dog-magnet of London Fields is right there — you’ll trip over dog-walkers with five or six pooches in tow.

Exit the other side and after passing along railway arches holding everything chic from pet-grooming to mid-century modern furniture, you hit the huge bus-busy artery of Mare Street, which links Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and Hackney.

Here, Second Home’s fourth venture has just opened, called Second Home London Fields. It joins the rest of the stable at Spitalfields, Clerkenwell, Holland Park, Lisbon, and shortly LA – all with a familial resemblance but a unique individual vibe, too.

With an eye-catching orange steel ramp up to the front entrance and a woven translucent membrane stretched across the front, pushed out on a steel armature, with big portholes cut into it, it’s no shrinking violet.

The frontage echoes the Sixties vibe of the old building — think Mary Quant see-through macs with heat-welded seams and armpits vented with large round steel eyelets, and you get the idea.

Innovative Spanish architect Cano Lasso, which designed the Munich Olympic stadium, assures us that the material, ETFE, is not flammable.

Cano Lasso determined to make the big boxy old four-storey Sixties building fun. Empty and of little architectural interest, it had replaced the bombed off front portion of an important, enormous 1879 building, Morley Hall, by Nonconformist Victorian genius James Cubitt, whose most famous extant building is the Union Chapel, Islington.

A triangular space in front holds a charming Grade II listed granite police-horse trough — which makes a very nice, long seat.

After two years in planning, Cano Lasso has re-worked and slightly sharpened the hugely successful Second Home palette of bright orange, polycarbonate, see-through curvy rooms, and really attractive communal spaces where acoustics are taken very seriously indeed.

Sound-softening is addressed sustainably using suspended 20mm cork boards, and rock-wool ceiling panels.

A circular motif is used throughout for wall mirrors; ceiling mirrors and cut-through holes between floors, often with plants suspended in them in transparent buckets. The neon logo outside is appealingly, waveringly circular.

But one of the best circular tricks is in one huge orange room, which has circular see-through table-tops (no legs) with a giant cylindrical lamp set into them, the whole affair suspended on pulleys, which allow the table to be winched up into a circular nest in the ceiling, where they become large chandeliers, freeing up the entire floor space for parties. It’s very Heath Robinson.

As at Second Home Spitalfields the ground floor has a café-restaurant open to the public, offering great street presence and good coffee. This area has specially designed furniture including really groovy stools and cardboard lamps over the café tables.

Elsewhere in the ground floor, ribbed polycarbonate walls with lightly crumpled metal foil behind them make a futuristic, luminous casing that also hides many of the pillars that originally blighted the space.

The décor has a distinct Thunderbirds vibe with a sofa and chair upholstered into one wall, and a wall of small mirrored cupboards behind the reception desk.

Upstairs, spaces are zoned using curvy translucent or transparent walls. There are few sharp angles. Brightly coloured chairs add zest. In this already well used workspace, everyone seems young and cheery.

But the biggest innovation is a dedicated nursery for members, run by N-Family Club. There’s even a large playground for the children on the roof.

Since co-owners Rohan Silva and Sam Aldenton each became parents during the past year, they understand the importance of making sure that busy parents can keep their children safe while they work.

Proven to help women in particular stay in work, this is a welcome move — and so popular that all the places are already taken.