Name: Touring Dyson’s Headquarters in a Singaporean National Monument With James Dyson
Uploaded: 2025-04-23T04:01:00Z
Duration: 9 min 7 s
Description: When Dyson renovated its new headquarters in a nearly 100-year-old Singaporean national monument, it faced a unique challenge: Everything it added had to be completely reversible. WSJ took a tour.

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When Dyson renovated its new headquarters in a nearly 100-year-old Singaporean national monument, it faced a unique challenge: Everything it added had to be completely reversible. WSJ took a tour. Photo Illustration: Luca Depardon for WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250422/c574cf97-8741-4f49-a7d0-642879ca6d1a/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

When Dyson renovated its new headquarters in a nearly 100-year-old Singaporean national monument, it faced a unique challenge: Everything it added had to be completely reversible. WSJ took a tour.

Touring Dyson’s Headquarters in a Singaporean National Monument With James Dyson 

Narrator: In Dyson's new headquarters, there's a whole lot of one thing. Space.

There's a lot of what I call wasted space, but it's a glorious waste of space.

Narrator: In 2019, Dyson started renovating St. James, a nearly 100-year-old powerhouse, as it planned to move its headquarters from England to Singapore. And despite sharing a name-

It is utterly coincidental that it's called St. James' Power Station, and when I first came here, in the early 1970s, it was providing electricity for Singapore. Since then, it's been a nightclub and various other things, and now, it's our office.

Narrator: And since this building is a national monument, everything Dyson built had to be reversible.

Every element was more like an addition as opposed to a subtraction.

Narrator: The Wall Street Journal toured the Dyson headquarters to see how the company turned a space built for machines into one built for people.

Right now we're at the reception of our global headquarters. This space also used to be the old boiler house.

Narrator: Originally, St. James was divided into three main buildings, the boiler house, the turbine hall, and the switch gear house.

The majority of the open plan office space is in the old boiler house here, as well as the turbine hall. This is also where we house a lot of our social spaces, like our cafe, our auditorium.

Narrator: And Dyson put its labs in the old switch gear house because it was already divided up.

If you come around the side here, you start to get a concept of what the building was like when we first came here. It was completely open, and that is the height. It's like a cathedral with these clerestory windows. There's one, two, three, four high, right up the building.

Narrator: In 2009, St. James was designated as a national monument. So when Dyson leased it in 2019, it had to follow strict guidelines, to restore and renovate it.

One of the key parameters was to ensure that the open volume space is always retained. So if you look up here, what we really tried to do is build a building within a building. So all of these new floor slabs rely on a completely new structural system onto a new foundation.

Narrator: Essentially, everything Dyson added to the 110,000 square foot building had to be completely reversible.

These things can be put in, installed, and then safely taken out afterwards. The main fabric of the building is preserved for another generation.

We also like to emphasize what is new and what is old. So if you look at the building, all of the new floor slabs actually rely heavily on the white columns here, which are differentiated from the old columns, which you see here.

So you'll see riveted beams everywhere, all, going all the way up there, and then steel girders across the top to hold the roof. It gives the building two characters really. The character it had for its first life, and then the character it now has in its second life. And I sort of find that dual function doubly interesting. So here we go through some strict security, but for some reason he's left the doors open for us.

Narrator: This used to be the turbine hall. Now it's the atrium. And right past security, you'll see this massive helical staircase.

We knew we wanted vertical circulation. We looked at a myriad of options from straight stairs to scissor stairs, to spiral stairs. And really, as with all Dyson products, its form follows function.

Narrator: While its function is clear, its form has taken on different meanings.

Anna: What I love is that people have drawn a lot of parallels to the stair with things that are related to our products.

When you look at it straight on, it has the look of a drill bit.

Which is a nod to our cyclonic action where we're separating things by centrifugal force in a Cyclone.

Whether it's the motor, whether it's a strand of hair going up, through using the same mindset and the process that we use for designing a building that we do for designing a product, actually, you get these very organic similarities in terms of the design, and that's how they manifest itself.

One of our key drivers was James Dyson's belief that inspiring spaces help ideas to grow. And we thought that this staircase represented something. It wasn't just the functional, it was also the idea that the most purest, most functional, most engineered things can be the most beautiful.

Narrator: Though the black metal stairs speak to the office's industrial heritage, the rest of the atrium was inspired by a campus quad.

This is really the beating heart of our community and everywhere that we planned around.

Narrator: So while the entrance has lots of steel and concrete, the atrium has more wood.

So you can see here, you know, where we've got the main thoroughfares, we have the concrete flooring, and where we have somewhere where people might linger for a little bit longer, we've chosen something softer like a timber flooring.

Narrator: Dyson chose softer materials to bring a sense of intimacy while maintaining the wide open space.

And it's just a sort of liberating feeling to be living and working in this kind of space with this kind of height. You're not limited by a ceiling here, you can dream here,

Narrator: But the open nature of the building also posed some challenges.

So there was a lot of hidden work that goes on with the management of light, definitely acoustics. That was a massive, massive challenge.

Narrator: A typical office building might keep each floor self-contained, which mitigates sound between floors. But Dyson didn't want to close off the atrium. Instead, it used these walls as a buffer between the noisy atrium and quiet workspaces. Then the team wove in subtle soundproofing throughout the space, like ceiling baffles, micro perforations in the timber paneling, and trees.

When you look up here, what they provide is a sense of softness, is a sense of biophilia, which helps with wellbeing. But at the same time, they have an acoustic quality with them. So what it helps to do is that as noise is traveling up, it helps to filter the noise with their leaves, and this way it controls the acoustics within the building too.

So this is a collaboration area where people can have meetings and you'll see a bit more of that round the corner, if you follow me round here. 'Cause this is a central theme of Dyson offices is there's an auditorium in them.

Narrator: Rather than enclosing the auditorium, Dyson put it in the atrium and built another main staircase through it.

It's a place where they can have a call, but it's also a space where we can host these really large scale events.

And it's right next to the cafe.

So this is the Dyson Cafe. As you can see, it's lunchtime and very busy at the moment. If you look up here, all of the timber baffles, as well as the timber paneling, is all micro perforated to help absorb some of that sound. But it is deliberately a very lively and very vibrant space.

Narrator: Though everything you first see in the cafe appears new, hidden around the corner is an architectural surprise.

Welcome to the chimney.

Narrator: The chimney was added to St. James in the 1950s. Now, it's a dining room.

Everything that we did here was as minimal as possible. Of course, we're in a chimney space, so there's a huge amount of echoing. So we want to do acoustic paneling down here. We didn't want to detract away from the beauty and the significance of the bricks. So the paneling is only up until a certain level. The lighting is all either from a surface level or very discreetly hidden. We didn't want to detract away from the chimney by seeing the light sources.

We saw a challenge. We saw something like, "How do we inhabit this space?" And we did something unique and different and ended up with a very, very happy outcome.

I'd love to have fitted more tables in the chimney, but there's only room for one. So it's first come, first served. It's very, very beautiful and unique, and this is a lovely place to sit and have lunch or even a dinner.

Narrator: Dyson's presence in Singapore has also grown outside of its headquarters. About 2000 employees are spread across St. James, Dyson's Technology Center and an advanced manufacturing campus.

Well, Singapore is a wonderful place for people like us to be. I mean, it's a technology country. It produces lots and lots of engineers. It recognizes the value of technology. It supports companies that want to develop technology and manufacture technology, and it's a sort of the center of Asia, so it's a very good springboard for us.

Narrator: This move, James Dyson says, marks its shift from an English company to a Singaporean one. And this office, with its own history, helped lay the foundation for Dyson's future.

You know, we could have built a new building, I suppose, but this has its own special character. And I think history is really interesting. It's looking at how things were made in the past. It's not how you're gonna make things in the future, but you can always learn things from it. So I'm a great believer in studying the past while creating the future.