Following a £3million refurbishment of the former Cecily Hill Barracks in Cirencester, turning it into the ultimate office space, money.co.uk founder and managing director Chris Morling and designer Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen met with Standard reporter Ryan Merrifield to talk about the project, dubbed 'Money Castle'.

THE FORMER Victorian fort, which became the headquarters for global comparison website money.co.uk three years ago, has undergone an extensive revamp job, with Chris looking to increase motivation and collaboration as he adds to his 50-strong staff team.

The redesign has incorporated a series of individually themed high-tech offices, as well as a Star Wars-inspired cinema, a hamster cage gym and a Rolling Stones bathroom.

What's more, meeting rooms are modelled on an ice cave, ski lodge and library with a 'secret passage'.

Nothing has been left untouched.

"When we moved in, it was quite depressing, with lots of magnolia walls, and we quickly realised we've got to spruce this up and make it into something special," said Chris, who founded money.co.uk in Cirencester 10 years ago with a tiny office on Park Street.

The three of us were sitting in the ice cave, which Chris admitted was one of his favourite features of the re-design, along with the urinals shaped like Mick Jaggers' lips. "The team had a massive hand in telling us what they wanted from the space, in terms of how they were going to use it," he explained.

"We interviewed everyone individually. We needed to understand what they wanted from their workspace. There are touches of each personality everywhere. But at the same time, it was absolutely fundamental that the place worked."

Ideas were passed to Laurence, who worked alongside design and build firm Interaction to come up with the design, with Chris very clear he absolutely didn't want to 'follow the norms'.

"Don't even think about how an office is supposed to be, think about how it could be," he said he told the designers.

Laurence explained that the idea was to make something completely different to a typical corporate environment.

"20th Century offices were so pre-ordained and designated, and you had specific areas and everyone had their own little desk, their own little empire. And it breeds a very strange corporate culture, where it's all about little me rather than the big us. The whole point here was to smash through as much of that as possible," said the former Changing Rooms star.

Instead, he modelled the re-design on the concept of a boutique hotel, where each room is 'flexible' and completely different to the next.

"To apply that to an office is very powerful because it instantly makes that link – particularly with the kind of guys that work here – with their ultimate weekend," he said.

"Make the week feel as much like the weekend as possible."

Chris and his team initially only took up part of the building, but with his staff ever-growing, he soon realised that if they were to avoid having to move again, he needed to renegotiate and takeover the whole site.

And the chance to work with the entirety of the 19th Century fort, and completely transform it into a modern place of work, where it all 'rhymes', was one of the main draws for Laurence.

He said traditional 'trendy offices' are usually just one refurbished space in a building, and "don't have any kind of relationship with the architecture".

"It would be very easy to just do some cool stuff for the board room that everyone is going to use, the way you're going to impress clients, but to keep that commitment going to the entrances, to the staircases, even the loos, the recreation rooms and the gym – nobody's really made a decent design commitment like that. But that goes right the way through here," he said.

"This is an extraordinary building, and so I wanted to make sure what we did do was have a relationship with that structure, and I think that works really well.

"The quirkiness and the individuality of the structure itself is what the company's all about. There's that sense of mould-breaking and doing things very differently."

A grade II listed building, the barracks was built in 1857 as the Royal North Gloucestershire Militia Armoury, before becoming the depot of the 4th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, and then a local base for the Home Guard in World War Two.

It then became a commercial building under the ownership of the Bathurst Estate, and was used by Cirencester College until 2013, before Chris moved in.

"It was, in part, exploratory," Chris said on how the regeneration began. "What we didn't know up front was how much we had to spend on the infrastructure to create the building that we wanted, and the lion's share of the money has gone on the infrastructure. It's gone on the re-plastering, knocking walls down, fixing all the damp issues that we had. It's all this sort of thing before you can even start to create the lavish design."

Then there was also all the technical features needed to run a global internet business.

"It's 12 and a half miles of cabling in this building. All the TVs are networked to a single hub, we've got SONOS throughout, network points and you can imagine how thick these walls are. The number of WiFi points we've got is phenomenal."

"Chris has made a commitment to the building financially," said Laurence.

"Yes, it all looks amazing, but actually the money that's gone into safeguarding its future, sorting out its structure, is incredible."

Laurence said he hoped that the project would set a precedent for refurbishments of old protected buildings, saying Heritage England and the local planning authority 'really saw it in context, that it was the complete definition of a building that wasn't going anywhere'.

"There's a bit of a knee jerk at the moment about new build the whole time, particularly with office space," he said. "But actually, we've got a huge stock of really very exciting, very interesting, very eclectic buildings, not only in Gloucestershire but all over the country, that people are scratching their heads and wondering what to do with.

"Being momentarily slightly political, it's very irritating that actually, it's easier for a developer to do something from scratch these days. There are no VAT breaks, no tax breaks with a refurbishment, which I think is wrong.

"I think refurbishments should be encouraged. But it's that whole green field, brown field thing. And I think here, there's also this idea that if you take on a building that's old, quirky, grade II listed you can't do anything to it. And we've proved that that's wrong.

"We've proved that actually, if you work creatively and you work very closely with Heritage and the Conservation board, you can do some really amazing stuff."

Laurence, who lives just outside the town, went on to say: "Cirencester is very important to me, the local economy is very important to me. And I think what Chris and money.co.uk are doing is really getting across that it's a really unusual but very fulfilling place to work and, importantly, actually works really well if you want to start a business here.

"I'm hoping that it has a very positive impact on the future of the Cotswolds and Cirencester."

Click here for more on the refurbishment.