Most of what follows is delivered under non-disclosure, so the names are withheld and the project photography is not ours to publish. What is not withheld is the method, the constraints and the numbers. Ask us for the rest in a meeting.
A research facility where the security envelope is not negotiable and the science programme changes faster than any fit-out cycle. Standard office layouts fail on both counts at once: they cannot be reconfigured without breaching zoning, and they assume a stable population.
We designed an activity-based workplace that flexes inside the constraint rather than against it. A single controlled-access threshold, one circulation spine, and flexible modules that pair and unpair as research teams grow, without any change crossing into the secure laboratory zone. Every module was sized against the group’s own ratios.
The centre is the pilot. The layout logic, the module dimensions and the security interface are written to be repeated on the group’s other research sites, which is why the documentation was produced as a standard rather than a one-off package.
New ways of working had been agreed at group level. The building had not caught up, and attendance told the story: people were making the journey only when they had no alternative.
We reorganised the flagship headquarters around the way the teams actually work now, then rewrote the group workplace design guidelines so that every site after this one starts from the same standard rather than from a fresh argument. The brief was written against the reasons people come in, not the reasons they stay away.
The house now has one building that demonstrates its own standard, and a document that lets the rest of the estate follow it. The objective was explicit from the first meeting: bring people back, not by mandate, but by giving them somewhere worth the commute.
Three companies, three cultures, three sets of habits, and a decision to put all of them under one roof. 1 700 people who had never shared a building, a corridor or a coffee machine.
Six months of design and change management run side by side rather than one after the other, so the workplace decisions and the cultural ones were taken in the same room. Workshops with each population, a shared settings language, and a zoning plan that deliberately mixed the three entities instead of giving each one a floor.
Eleven months from the first workshop to the first working day. The merger stopped being an organisation chart and became a building people could read: one entrance, one restaurant, one set of rules, and neighbours who were not from your old company.
A portfolio spread across EMEA, refurbished office by office as lease events arrived. Different countries, different landlords, different base-build conditions, different labour rules, and a head office that could not fly to every site.
One design standard, one furniture standard and one reporting format, applied site by site. Local delivery teams under a single programme lead, so the client had one interlocutor rather than a dozen. Each completed site fed the next: what we learned about a base-build condition in one country became a design decision in the next.
A multi-year programme rather than a series of projects, with cost and programme improving as it went. A programme like this is not won on the first site. It is won on the twentieth, when the client has stopped checking.
Client names and locations are withheld under non-disclosure, and project photography is not ours to publish. The images on this site are indicative of the environments we deliver. We will walk you through any of these projects in person, with the drawings.
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