Case Study:
Hamilton Airport
Operating since 1935, Hamilton Airport serves over 700,000 customers per year. When the need arose for seismic resilience work to take place, the Airport took this opportunity to completely refurbish and revitalise the internal space. The primary challenge was to better reflect the Airport’s important role as a ‘gateway to the region’ and to offer a more welcoming, functional, and culturally resonant customer experience.
Among other custom materials, such as hand-woven ceiling details and bespoke flooring design, the furniture was identified as a crucial element to achieving the Airport’s goals. Key requirements included New Zealand design and manufacture, excellent sustainability credentials, aesthetic harmony with the other interior elements, and the performance and durability expected in a heavy use, high traffic space. Meeting all of these requirements, Fletcher Design was engaged to work closely with both the Airport and Archimedia Waikato Architects from the early stages of the project.
“We were extremely impressed with Fletcher Design’s ability to respond to our needs and provide a tailored, unique solution that adds value to our customers’ experience”
— Angela Beardsmore, Customer Experience Manager
HAMILTON AIRPORT
20+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
Utilising both a consultative approach, and offering their 20-plus years of experience working in other high-traffic public spaces, the Fletcher Design team produced a complete solution based around the award-winning Landscape v2 modular system.
Landscape v2 supports the needs of a variety of end-users in the airport – from laptop or device use, focus working, short and long waiting, food and beverage; as well as catering to a variety of ages, single passengers, families and groups.
Rather than designate one ‘business’ space, discreet power and USB charging solutions were deployed on each Landscape v2 setting throughout the airport. Combined with small, easily reconfigurable custom Laptop tables, every space became suitable for both work, wait or relaxation. Landscape’s two seat heights also allowed a variety of usage. In the Departure Lounge, Landscape v2 settings are Lounge height, with a lower and deeper seat. Colab settings, with dining-height seat and supportive back, are used closer to the café and tv areas to provide options for food & beverage use, focus working, and socialising.
SIGNATURE SCULPTURAL ELEMENTS
The signature sculptural elements of the Fletcher Design collection were also an important consideration and a deliberate choice, to work in concert with the custom flooring, ceiling details, and mahi toi – cultural artworks. Interwoven into all of these elements is meaning, whether it is cultural storytelling – symbolic representation of earth and sky, a ‘moment in time’, and motifs of the Pekapeka, the New Zealand native Long-tailed Bat.
Fletcher Design was privileged to contribute to this Manaakitanga, or sense of place.
