Technology companies are often known for their whimsical office spaces, relaxed atmospheres and shake-your-fist-at-convention attitudes. Think: hammocks and giant slides at Google or picnic tables and video games at Zappos.
Rackspace, a global web-hosting and cloud managing firm headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, is not one to be outdone. The company purchased the deteriorating Winsdor Park Mall in 2007 and has steadily revamped its corporate offices into spaces with themes like breakfast cereals, toys and movies. The former mall is now known as “The Castle.”
Rackspace’s workplace experience team tapped the creative brand imaging and signs experts at Cold Fire to bring their playful vision for The Castle to life.
“We’ve done about 100 rooms so far,” says Chris Jackson, Cold Fire’s founder and president. “They’re trying to create an environment where you don’t feel like you’re in a corporate work environment … to spur creativity and employee engagement.”
The workplace experience team typically comes up with the ideas for each of the sections, Jackson says, and his team then finds the best media to print the wall murals on. He often chooses dreamScape wallcoverings, thanks to the wide variety of finishes that are compatible with his HP Latex 360 printer. The latex capabilities, he says, allows him to print durable, scratch resistant wall murals that do not need to be laminated.
Two of the more recent rooms that Cold Fire has completed are The Dollhouse and The Lodge. The Dollhouse is actually a conference room with wooden furniture centered in a room with murals that look like the rooms of a child’s dollhouse, giving it a nostalgic feel.
The exterior of the room is framed by a white fence and a wooden deck that holds a handful of rocking chairs. “The idea is to increase employee morale,” Jackson says. “So you’re not going to the same old mundane work environment every day.”
The Lodge is a smaller meeting room, complete with brick fireplace, tree stump side tables and the mounted head of a wildebeest. The room’s overstuffed, dark brown leather furniture gives it the ambiance of a true lodge — a dramatic departure from some of the other more whimsical rooms.
“They give me the room dimensions and create the graphics from scratch,” Jackson says. “What I do is suggest the media. In The Lodge, the log cabin-like walls were printed on the dreamScape wallcovering with the wood grain texture on it, which is applied with wallpaper paste.”
Jackson says the rooms in the renovated mall are nearly all completely reimagined by the Rackspace team. But this creative duo’s work isn’t done yet. Cold Fire is currently working on Rackspace’s New York City sales office, with urban wall murals of graffiti and maps.
“We spent the first two years trying to find something that would adhere to the concrete walls. We tested a material during the summer before the initial opening of the stadium and that material seemed to work perfectly, but when we applied the vinyl a week before the game, in the winter months, the ambient temperature of the concrete had dropped considerably. The next day, we received a call from the Cotton Bowl folks telling us that a majority of our stickers had fallen off the walls. After all of our testing we were very surprised. We found a way to fix the signs that failed, but it made the project much more difficult and time-consuming,” says Jeff Teasley, owner of E.H. Teasley & Co. “In 2011 we were lucky to find PhotoTex. It’s a lighter weight material, and the adhesion properties are so much better than what we used for the prior game. To make sure we were on the right track before the game installation, we took it to a business near us with stucco-type walls. The graphic stayed up there for months in all of the outdoor elements. Seeing this, we felt confident that Photo Tex would do the job. Now we could sleep at night.”
The graphics were printed on the company’s superwide solvent printers, which included a quantity of 352 four foot by four foot die-cut helmets and logos cut on a Zund cutter. These graphics lined the various levels of the stadium, the tunnels where the teams enter the field, as well as the lobbies of the host hotels. The hotel elevators were also branded with Photo Tex 
