New digs

We moved into a new office this week. I found the place after a lot of looking around. I had real estate agents take me to probably 30 or 40 different locations over the course of a month or so. When I first started looking all I could find in our price range were sort of dingy high-rises. These were generally built in the late 90s when the Chinese were first figuring out how to build skyscrapers. Since then they basically mastered it and have some amazing buildings now. Anyway, I found the prospect of moving into a C class building with two elevators for 25 floors a little disheartening so I asked the real estate agent if he could find us some sort of loft-like space -- an old warehouse or factory conversion. They told me that they had actually started doing those things in Shanghai and they took me to a few. I finally settled on a space with ceilings that are probably 20 feet high. When I saw how high they were I figured we could probably build a mezzanine, which is what we ended up doing. It provided a pretty nice space since I had them push the mezzanine against the back wall and away from the windows so we now have an atrium-like feel to a good portion of the space. The designers were initially pushing these really wild colors; pinks, yellows and light greens. We ended up settling on something sort of modern but Chinese-y. I'm not sure I'm sold on the traditional red and yellow Chinese colors that they painted the main pillars, but all the employees seem to like it. It's still a work in progress and were occupying about half of the space currently while the rest of the furniture is coming in. These pictures are from a few weeks ago. They can really put things things together quickly once the basic construction is done.