How offices are taking interior design cues from luxury hotels, creating quietly sophisticated workplaces
- Forget cookie-cutter offices – companies are designing feel-good workplaces that are also flexible, sociable and hotel-like in sophistication and ambience.
- Innovations include non-fixed modular systems and ‘non-office’ aesthetics
In office buildings around Hong Kong, something out of the ordinary is going on: the firms moving in are specifying a desire for interior design far removed from that which their clients – and staff – are accustomed to.
In line with a distinct 2019 trend, office design is being disrupted, just like everything else. No longer are indoor slides and foosball tables a measure of workplace attractiveness – now, it’s all about quiet sophistication.
Take the new One Taikoo Place, Quarry Bay office of global law firm Eversheds Sutherland. Stephen Kitts, managing partner for Asia, wanted something edgier than the cookie-cutter structured office that had long been the template for many law offices, so his brief to design firm Spatial Concept was to “do something awesome”.
Gary Lai, founder and design director at Spatial Concept, took inspiration from the hospitality sector. “We’re seeing a lot of offices looking more like a luxury hotel, and vice versa, hotel lounges becoming work environments enabled by mobile technology,” he says.
The first sign of this trend is evident in Eversheds Sutherland’s 37th-floor foyer, modelled after a first-class airline lounge where receptionists stand at pods and greet each visitor on arrival. Behind are the postcard Hong Kong harbour views to which the city’s most prestigious hotels would aspire.