The interior is anything but old-school: a bright bunch of balloons floats above the legless side of the reception desk, appearing to hold it up, while the other end of the desk is supported by outsize Jenga blocks.

“If you are in a creative industry it’s about possibility and playfulness,” says Rory Hamilton, creative director and one of the six founders of Boys and Girls. “If you’re making a reception desk, why not make it float?”

For a nanosecond in the reception area of the late 19th-century former school inDublin 8 visitors will pick up on something different, he says. And after that split-second of sensory fermentation, while you sit awaiting a meeting with one of the six people (four boys and two girls) who established Boys and Girls, you note quirky touches such as the inevitable escaped balloon kissing the ceiling across the room and a helium bottle beneath the desk, apparently to re-inflate the balloon. Except they are made from something much more solid than rubber and were sprayed in pop colours by a local car mechanic, while the Jenga blocks (one upside down) were crafted by a local carpenter.

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So natural seems the fit with a school that you would imagine the agency was named after the building – yet it turns out the Boys and Girls signs on the pillars flanking the entrance were made by the company, which began in recessionary times in 2009, in Pembroke Road, Dublin 4.

From its inception, the company used the power of playful imagination and online networking to build a reputation, initially with Lego blocks, 28,000 of which were used to make a huge table (designed with an algorithm to ensure no repeat patterns). Indeed, had the advertising and marketing business not succeeded, the company could have made a success of the bright-block tables. After posting images of the Lego creation online, the company got 1,000 requests for similar tables. “Someone in Germany copied that table right down to our logo,” says Hamilton. “The internet got us a bit of a name.”

Divided rooms

Despite the  economy, Boys and Girls grew to its current 45 staff and they began to struggle with the divided rooms in their original Georgian home, with Hamilton taking to working on the stairs. So they began to look for a new premises and found “there are a load of awful offices around, in anonymous blocks, which are very expensive. That depressed me. In a creative industry you don’t want to be bringing people into what looks like an accountant’s office.” So, they looked further from the city centre and found the school a year and a half ago. At that point it resembled “an 80s’ dream, with small rooms and blue carpet tiles”. Yet they saw beyond the nylon haze to the potential that has now been realised: “Moving somewhere like this gave us the opportunity to do something very interesting.”

Alongside the retained period features, such as wood-panelled walls and the terrazzo entrance hall, the joy and colour spreads beyond reception – where Ladybird books are laid out beneath the glass top of a coffee table and a Beano cover is framed on the wall – to the meeting room beside it, where the Lego table rests (Hamilton had wanted to explode it to mark the move). In a boardroom on the other side of reception a vast table was cast in concrete with the company's B&G logo embossed on it. In the canteen, light bulbs glow from clusters of dangling Kilner jars, and the table-tennis room has bats lining a wall and 11,000 table-tennis balls in plastic casing suspended from the ceiling. The building was designed by Marc Kilkenny-Architects (MK-A, marckilkenny.com), and under Kilkenny's direction the team went way beyond the brief, to the point where they designed the furniture and lighting in collaboration with Boys and Girls and specialist craftspeople.

Spending pennies

The inventiveness runs to the bathrooms where there are cut-outs of old Irish pennies because that’s where you spend them. Everything cost less than it would off the peg and was created with craftspeople both local and afar, from the concrete table cast in Glasgow, to the car-spray workshop around the corner that coated the “balloons” .

In a rear office, a slide runs down the wall beside standard steps which in turn are next to large plywood stairs people can sit and chat on. Should the steps or even the slide be too pedestrian a descent, you can use the fireman's pole that drops from the floor above – inspired by Hamilton's childhood love of the Ghostbusters film. Other childhood manifestations include gym  "horses" with two hooped handles that some of us recall hoofing over back when school gyms were more daring environments.

This office interior is a brave move in a world where many companies prefer to play safe and do things the way they have always been done. “A lot of industries are risk-averse,” says Hamilton. He insists that they do think things through. They work with the mantra “daring simplicity” and do worry – they were concerned, for instance, that the Lego table might cause an epileptic fit – “but all our risks have paid off”.

Not only have they worked with the building – winning themselves a design prize in the office/commercial category of the Glasgow Institute of Architect awards – but also with their industry and staff. When they encounter the office, “clients can see you know what you are talking about in terms of creativity,” says Hamilton. “And if you are asking staff to be creative you should try and put them in an environment that sparks that creativity.”