Ferrari, Sydney

Ferrari's Sydney head office is not a normal floor plate. It is tiled white, with planting, framed pictures and display plinths carrying models, and the furniture in it is either red or it is quiet. A phone booth in standard grey or white would have read as office equipment parked in a brand environment, which is the one thing it could not do.

So the booth went to a paint shop before it went to site. Rosso Corsa is a car colour, not a furniture finish, and the only way to get it onto a Framery One properly is to spray the panels flat, before the booth is a booth. Every panel went through: the two long flanks, the roof, the door frame, and the ceiling unit with its ventilation blades, which were finished in red as well rather than left dark. The glazing apertures were masked and papered, and the panels came back a full gloss, not the satin a joinery shop would normally hand over.

That sequence is only possible because of how the product goes together. A Framery One is assembled in the room from flat panels rather than wheeled in whole, so the panels can be diverted to a spray booth on the way, and the finish arrives on site already cured instead of being sprayed in an occupied office.

Full gloss is the demanding choice. It is a mirror, so it reports every ripple in the substrate underneath it and every piece of dust that settled while it flashed off. You can read the quality of the preparation in the reflections in these photographs, which is the point: on a brand this careful, a finish that was nearly right would have been worse than no paint at all.

The graphics went on in two places and they behave differently. On the flank, the prancing horse sits high and in black, well above the eye line, so it reads from across the floor and does not sit in the reflection you see when you walk up to the booth. On the front, it is frosted into the glazing at about eye height, where a glazing manifestation marking normally goes on a full height glass panel. The mark that tells you the glass is there is the same mark that tells you whose building you are in.

In place it sits on a red carpet inset, with a banquette alongside and the Ferrari marks repeated on the scatter cushions. Geneva supplied the booth and ran the custom finish and the graphics. Everything else in the frame was already the client's.