A global payments company, Sydney

This is a whole floor of furniture for a global payments company in the Sydney CBD. The client is not named here. Geneva supplied the package: the meeting and boardroom tables, the electric sit to stand desks, the task seating, the meeting chairs, the lounge and booth seating, the stools and the occasional tables.

The palette is the first thing worth noticing, because of what it does not do. Black task chairs, pale oak tops, a grey blue carpet, and colour held back to the upholstery on the loose seating and the tops of the side tables. There is no accent wall doing the heavy lifting and no colour blocked desk screens. On a floor where most of the visual noise is going to come from monitors and people, a quiet specification ages better than a loud one, and it survives the inevitable churn of desks without needing to be re-matched.

The all hands room is the part that repays study. It is furnished entirely in loose pieces: small tub armchairs on four pale timber legs, each with its own round side table, arranged in a rough horseshoe facing a screen wall. Nothing is fixed, nothing is modular, nothing needs two people and a trolley. The room can be a presentation on Tuesday, four separate conversations on Wednesday and an empty floor for an event on Thursday, and resetting it is a job anyone can do in ten minutes.

That is a deliberate trade. Fixed modular lounge seating photographs better and costs less per seat, and it also turns a room into one thing forever. A company that is still growing into its floor is better served by furniture it can move than by furniture that looks resolved.

Out on the open floor the desks are electric sit to stand, and the task chairs come in two Humanscale models rather than one. Both are mesh backed and neither carries a tension dial, because the Humanscale recline is weight sensitive and calibrates itself to whoever sits down. It is the right answer for a floor where people do not keep the same desk, and it removes the most common reason a good chair gets used badly, which is that nobody adjusted it.

The rest of the package fills in the postures between the desk and the meeting room: booths with high upholstered backs on the window line, stools at the benches, armchairs and a two seater lounge in the softer corners, and round meeting tables where a four person conversation does not need a room with a door. None of it is remarkable on its own. The point is that all of it arrived from one place, in one programme, matched to one set of finishes.