Nicholas Alexander worked with Campaign Design and M&C Saatchi Sport and Entertainment to create The Havana Club Mojito Embassy.

The Embassy’s ‘Mojito Market’ forms the heart of the bar, encouraging guests to gather their own fresh ingredients from street trolleys piled high with mint and lime. After stocking up on ingredients, a team of Havana Club bartenders guides them through the art of making Cuban mojitos.

We were tasked with developing and fabricating a set of components so that on site, the install would create a seamless, whole experience. Given the particular atmosphere Havana wanted to create, we were able to employ our skills in specialist finishing techniques to create hand painted signage alongside distressed, stained timber joinery elements and bespoke steel framing.

As well as the fabrication itself, we also handled the touring and associated logistics and the installation into different venues, each with their own challenges. On site our team were able to make appropriate adjustments whilst working with local crew to ensure that the Embassy became a part of the fabric of each building it visited.

The pop-up event will be touring throughout Europe in the summer of 2013 after initial events in Milan, Edinburgh and Lisbon last year.

Nicholas Alexander was approached by Fever PR to take on the challenge of floating a 50ft inflatable rubber duck along the river Thames for online bingo brand – Jackpotjoy.com

We were hired for our extensive experience of delivering complex and large scale projects in a challenging environment. Initially, we acted as consultants to develop a viable plan for delivery which we ourselves then carried out.

The duck was a test of our risk management and problem solving abilities and saw us visiting Leavesden film studios (the only sufficiently large indoor space) to test run the inflation and structural support of the duck before she set sail on a beautiful December’s day. The high-risk scheme was delivered flawlessly and received much media attention – the perfect project!

To celebrate Guinness’s 250th anniversary we worked with Jump Studios to create a bespoke submarine/bar which navigated its way to the depths of the Baltic around the Stockholm Archipelago in Sweden.

It took a lot of research to find a set of specifications we ought to be working to – finally settling on the American standards for submersible vessels. This led our choice of materials, using an advanced fire retardant and low de-gassing GRP.

We then surveyed the interior of the sub, paying extra attention to the two small access hatches we were going to have to pass all the interior components through! We knew that we would have to basically fit a ship in a bottle, so we set about making a mock-up of both the interior of the vessel and a hatch to test out passing all the parts through safely.

From our plans and cross sections, Jump studios produced designs for a series of different sectional elements which produced the interior and all the functionality required for the event. We then added in the provision for necessary services, air supplies, lighting and emergency access to oxygen masks, before producing a set of CNC cut moulds.

We installed all the interior components in Sweden in arctic conditions on the dockside over a 6 day period. The sub was launched a few weeks later for sea trials before the main event which saw completion winners enjoying a pint of Guinness deep below the surface!

Nicholas Alexander worked in collaboration with designer Alexander Mulligan to create a site-specific installation, at J+A Cafe during Clerkenwell Design Week, May 2013, and into June.

J+A Café’s outdoor courtyard area would have once been a busy thoroughfare for cattle en-route to Smithfield market. We responded to this old area of London and the history behind its ancient Drovers by designing an architectural structure that illustrates the narrative, movement and energy which would have existed on those grounds many years ago.

For Gamescom 2009 Nicholas Alexander co-created and built a groundbreaking stand for Bethseda Software.

The brief was to recreate Bethesda’s game, Brink, in the real world. Nicholas Alexander devised a three dimensional environment inspired by the two key aspects of the game: a dystopian container city and a utopian floating island. Thus visitors could preview the game and experience it three dimensionally and leave the stand feeling as though they have lived the game.

We worked closely with Root design studio to develop a layout with real functionality. It included two screening rooms, a game demo area and a fully immersive 360 degree cinema. And in the middle of it all, a peaceful, utopian floating island featuring projected footage from within the game and a large sculpture of the game’s iconic tower.

All the elements were created from scratch, from raw materials, and to a class 1 fire resistance. The entire project was delivered in 8 weeks from concept to opening in Cologne, thus proving that a tight deadline doesn’t have to limit your creativity!

We were approached in 2010 by PD3 to take a project for Sony from its preliminary stages to completion. There was already an agreed structural design that had been submitted to the airport operator, in this case BAA. Our role was to deliver the project as per the visual plan, and fulfil all of BAA’s stringent technical demands, and fit the whole object through a security scanner!

We rationalised the existing project plans, and produced our own construction plans which were submitted and agreed to by BAA. At all points we also needed to consider the requirements of Sony, and deliver a high quality object in a very short lead time.

Despite some teething problems with the incumbent logistical company at the airport, we worked through the night over a period of two weeks to complete the installation.

PD3 had produced an innovative 360 degree immersive film that we showed on Sony hardware in the centre of the stand. We also included space for product display, a projection onto the ceiling, and a constantly moving spiral of coloured light.

This was a project that required extremely close collaboration on all elements, and throughout the process we pushed the boundaries of material supply chains, on-site installation processes, and put a large and structurally difficult object in one of the most controlled environments in the country – Heathrow’s terminal 5.