Gazeta.ru and Championat.com: where news is born

The new offices of Championat.com and Gazeta.ru not only share the same designers, Nefa Architects, but also the same four-storey, 19th-century Moscow building that once served as the Danilovskaya factory. Having moved to the building to be closer to the various subdivisions of parent company Rambler&Co, the two organisations share communal spaces such as the hall, with formally belongs to Championat.com, and Gazeta.ru’s dining room, positioned on the top floor.

The two design projects have much in common, but there are plenty of distinctive features in each. The space dedicated to Gazeta.ru, which focuses on news linked to politics, style and motoring, is located on the third and fourth floors and includes areas for individual and team working, meeting rooms, lounge areas and a café and dining room.
The main colour is without doubt white, with some of the furniture (bookcases, chairs and lamps) finished in black, the same colour used for the letters dotted around the flooring, which makes it look like the pages of newspaper. The majority of the furniture was tailormade to fit the ideas of the designers: the desks used by the editors and assistants are positioned in the centre of the newsroom, to ensure news can be shared more quickly and easily.

Championat.com, meanwhile, is a sports news website. It is one of the largest streaming websites in Russia, covering live events and matches. Once again, the office is distributed over two storeys, with a reception area featuring a desk with multimedia panels showing sports content. The work areas and meeting rooms are located on the second floor.
The heart of the newsroom is a large, white, ring-shaped table – with a monitor above in the ceiling – situated in the centre of the office in order to improve communication. This serves as an open-plan area for company directors to operate in. To underline the sporty nature of the company, Nefa Architects drew inspiration from those old school gyms, the ones you might see in a Fellini film, using red bricks for the walls, parquet flooring and other detailing in metal and glass.

 

Credits

Furniture: Vitra, Prooff, Tolix, Bonaldo, Roche Boboise
Lighting: Vibia, Artemida, Flos, Linealight, Loft, Planlicht, SLV; supplier- Aura City
Floors: self-levelling polymeric floors, pine strip flooring

Photographs: Ilya Ivanov