The 1,100-Foot-Long Desk At The Barbarian Group Isn't The First Of Its Kind

We know we're a little late to the party, but that 1,100-foot-long desk at The Barbarian Group's new office is pretty cool.

It flows throughout the online ad agency's 23,000-square-foot office and creates intimate "villages" that are separate from each other, but still come together to form a whole, according to its designer.

And the employees seem to like it (you'll see below).

The "endless table" puts the company's space in the trendy office ranks of Google, Facebook, Instagram and other but it's not the first of its kind.

The 59-year-old architect who designed the desk, Clive Wilkinson, told The New York Times he already designed a similar table back in 2004.

"We were working with an advertising agency in London called Mother, which had started with six people around a kitchen table. When we began with them, they had a 75-person table and they wanted a 200-person table. We based it on a racetrack the Fiat company had on their Turin factory rooftop, a big oval. It was 14 feet wide and cast in concrete, which was suitably ridiculous for an advertising company. They're all about ephemera, and three-inch-thick concrete with rebar is as permanent as you can get," he said.

The desk at The Barbarian Group is 4,400 square feet and is similar to a surfboard; plywood, a medium-density fiberboard and a single resin pour over it to create the top.

It cost $300,000 or $2,400 per employee, each of which has five feet of space. That might sound pricy, but it would have more expensive to build traditional cubicles, according to company chairman Benjamin Palmer.

There are currently about 125 employees but the desk and new office could accommodate 175, according to Wilkinson. Even at capacity, each employee would still have four feet of workspace.

The Barbarian Group hadn't built a new office space from scratch in eight years and was due for an upgrade.

Here's a video tour of the new office and some photos of the "endless table" with employees posing and working at it.

Introducing the Superdesk from The Barbarian Group on Vimeo.