Petridish

Petridish is a shared office and coworking building at 8 Stafford Street in central Dunedin that also operates as a meeting and event venue. It combines coworking desks, private office suites, meeting rooms, event spaces and an in-house cafe in a single heritage building, and hires the meeting and event spaces out to external organisers as well as to its members.

The building

The premises are the former Ross and Glendinning textile manufacturing building, a Victorian factory dating from 1864. It has since been fully refurbished and 100 percent earthquake strengthened, a project spanning around ten years led by local owners Jason and Kate Lindsey. The building runs to five floors of shared space, including executive spaces in the penthouse, and is now home to more than 70 businesses working from the site.

Meeting rooms

Petridish has six meeting rooms, three of them on the ground floor, accommodating groups of between two and 18 people. All meeting rooms are fitted with current presentation and conferencing technology, including screen mirroring, projectors and touch screen monitors. Hire is available on hourly, half-day and full-day rates.

Event spaces

There are multiple event spaces. The ground floor event space sits alongside breakout rooms and is used for seminars, workshops and corporate evening events; up to 70 guests can be accommodated where the three ground-floor meeting rooms are also used as breakout or networking areas. The Rear Event Space is positioned for business events such as networking functions, smaller conferences and intimate seminars, and is fitted with a large screen and a lectern for branding, slides or imagery.

Food and beverage

An in-house cafe called The Dish operates within the building. Petridish is fully licensed and services delivered catering, offering beer, wine and cider, non-alcoholic beverages and tea and coffee, with Precinct Food listed as its preferred caterer. The building is open to visitors during the working week from 8.30am to 5.30pm.

Suitability

Petridish is one of the more complete small-to-mid-size MICE options in central Dunedin. The pairing of a 70-person event space with three adjoining breakout rooms is genuinely useful for a workshop programme or a small conference that needs parallel sessions, and the fitted AV in every room reduces the need for hired equipment. A licensed bar, delivered catering and an on-site cafe cover the food and beverage side.

It suits training days, workshops, board and strategy sessions, seminars, small conferences, networking functions, launches and client evenings. Organisers running events for several hundred delegates will need a larger facility, but for groups from two to around 70 in the city centre Petridish is well configured. See more Dunedin venues.