The rise and fall of studio furniture

After the successful installation of 60 rise-and-fall editing desks for the Farm Group’s 33,000 sq ft central London post facility, along with 35 grading, audio, track-laying and finishing desks, AKA’s range of rise and fall studio furniture is being adopted across many more media industries. The long hours spent in online suites means this flexible way of working is becoming more popular with editors, mixers, composers, VFX and gamers, who often spend hours working in front of multiple screens.
Already this year, AKA has installed rise-and-fall desks for a variety of disciplines, including Filmlight grading suites at Splice Post, various film screening rooms, new studios for Radar Radio in Shoreditch, plus suites for Jingles music company, Wise Buddah. The desk’s unique system enables AKA to supply them up to 3 metres in length. And with today’s array of screens and monitors, including grading and audio panels plus space for clients and editors to work comfortably together, this is essential. This system was recently adopted for Absolute Radio's new flagship studio at their Soho headquarters, where a large central radio desk was designed to give both the presenter and guest the choice to sit or stand, depending on the session or interview format of the particular show.
AKA has incorporated many new features into this range, including custom Genelec monitor stands that rise with the desk, ergonomic power and data points for clients, acoustic vanity screens and integrated lighting. The company also has an app that enables the user to set their own ergonomic preferences by Bluetooth when they walk into the suite.
AKA has a rise-and-fall system on its smaller ProMedia desk, which is flat-packed for easy installation on site. These desks come in a variety of finishes, with a 2-3 week lead time, and offer the perfect solution for tracklay suites, gaming, audio or smaller editing suites.
Managing Director of AKA, Guy Wilson, explains, “The design, ergonomics and styling is always of the upmost importance to all of the furniture that AKA produces, but reliability is a key to any rise-and-fall desk installation. I’ve seen my fair share of broken or stuck desks while visiting facilities over the years; without compromising on the style and finish of our desks, we’ve made sure they are designed specifically to take the weight of the equipment and have the cabling and stability that’s needed for these environments. The fact that we have not had a single failure on any of the 60 edit desks we supplied to The Farm is testament to the R&D we did from the onset, plus the build quality and reliability of our third-party partnership with Linak, who are Europe’s largest supplier of actuators.”
The Farm Group’s CEO, David Klafkowski, comments, “We love AKA’s furniture – the edit desks are reliable, they look fantastic and they’ve been incredibly well-received by both our clients and operators.”
For further information on the full range of stylish AKA Design studio furniture, please visit www.akadesign.com.