Waikato's highest office in the heart of Hamilton's CBD seems a fitting location to house one of the New Zealand's fastest growing tech companies.
Quietly working away, Macfarlane Engel and Associates (MEA) specialises in mobile app development, touting the tagline "we were making apps before there was an app store".
The company has grown from a three-man operation in 2007 to being named one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Asia-Pacific last year with five offices across the US, Australia and New Zealand.
With the company headquarters still in Hamilton, the company has doubled in size every year apart from last year, and is set to do so again this year.
Co-founder Gabriel Engel said 2007 he and co-founders Rodney Macfarlane and Bruce Seymour began developing point of sale apps to be used in restaurants and retail outlets.
Still restricted from being allowed to properly install app software into devices, the company's next big venture was a lighting control system, IGlo. Commissioning lighting hardware from the South Island MEA Mobile, as they were called then, began selling both the hardware and the app that controlled it online.
By selling through web-giant Amazon and others, suddenly MEA's products were worldwide.
A partnership with Samsung even saw the devices installed in Time Square and app users able to edit the lighting in New York's most famous attraction.
"The next biggest thing was a vintage Super 8 filter. This was before Instagram came out," Engel said.
ISupr8 allowed users to record high-resolution video with a vintage look, and it was not long before MEA were partnering with Levis and Rip Curl to develop branded filters.
Perhaps MEA's most famous app is Printicular, which holds the title of fastest-growing photo-printing app on the planet. By partnering with Walgreens, an American supermarket chain comparable in size to Walmart, users can print any photo from their phones and pick up in-store.
Not bad for an app developer based in Hamilton, but Mr Engel said the success can be attributed to all three founders being on the same wavelength, co-ordinating from their home centres of Hamilton, Auckland and New Haven, Connecticut.
"We operate differently to most app developers. We place revenue over volume," he said.
Unlike most app companies which look to grab as many users as possible and then find a way to generate revenue, MEA looks for more direct revenue streams.
"We prefer 10 customers paying $10 than a million users paying nothing."
Printicular is a perfect example of this - although the app is free, MEA receives a cut every time a photo is printed.
Other recent projects include a series of apps specialised for galleries and an app currently in development for the Warehouse.
iARTView users can see how a piece of art will look in a room and use that to decide on a purchase.
It is a cut-throat world in app development, and Engel said MAE's operations reflected this.
"We put someone in a room to follow through with a project - if it doesn't create revenue we remove it."
"We have had many flops, but the key is containing those," he said.
Engel said the global average earning for an app is $7000 for Apple and around $2000 for android, so anything above that is the target, while keeping costs below.
There is room for passion however.
Project manager Kat Cox said when one of the developers, who happened to be a keen cyclist, came to her she was happy to test the market with a personal trainer app.
From this a new tradition began in the office.
"Whenever we have something to celebrate we ring a bike bell. It rings about once a week.
"If it's a big victory we might have a shared lunch or drinks."
Engel said as the company had grown, so had the threshold to ring the bell. But being an app company, it wasn't long before the bell became a virtual one.
Developed on behalf of the Waikato Rugby Union, the new Cowbell App is hoped to replace the traditional cowbell at games, which have caused injuries and even been banned from games in the past.
"It's a health and safety bell," Ms Cox said.
The app, which costs $4.99 with most proceeds going to the Union, not only rings when shaken, but with bluetooth turned on will also ring in unison with other phones in the vicinity, thereby increasing in volume the more people use it.
The app also uses a platform called Crowd Scope , which Engel said in the future could be used to turn every user's phone into a single pixel which will then create a massive image across whole crowds.
Ms Cox said her favorite app was Shakespear, which is literally a pear that when shaken produces a Shakespeare quote.
Printicular's potential put it to the top of Engel's list, with future expansions including printing on everything from buttons to fabric and furniture.
It seems MEA has picked an industry that is only going to grow.
"There's more access to smart phones than drinking water - that's an unfortunate fact," Engel said.
"This is the first time in human history where making almost anything is possible and we are able to release it to the entire world instantaneously."