King & Spalding, Sydney

King & Spalding's Sydney office is the most expensive looking project on this page, and it is worth being precise about why. Geneva supplied all the furniture, and a large part of it was custom made rather than specified from a catalogue.

The reason is the joinery. The client floor is lined in dark walnut, curved in places, with glazed offices on a tight rhythm and a slatted timber ceiling over the boardroom. A room detailed to that standard does not have standard dimensions, and a catalogue table in a standard size leaves a gap at one end that nobody can unsee. The boardroom table, the oval meeting table and the round table were all made to the rooms they sit in, in a dark stained timber that answers the walnut without matching it.

Against that, the seating is deliberately familiar. Tan leather soft pad chairs on black five star bases, the same chair in the boardroom, the meeting rooms and pulled up to the round table. It is a restrained choice on a project with this budget, and it is the right one: the joinery and the table are doing the talking, and a second statement piece in the same room would be an argument rather than a scheme.

Reception is the other client facing room and it is furnished as a lounge rather than a waiting area. Tan chairs in a loose group on a rug, black round side tables, a stone reception desk behind. In a law firm the person waiting is often waiting a while and frequently not alone, and a group of chairs lets two people who arrived together actually talk.

Behind all of that is the half of the project nobody photographs. The private offices are built on Thinking Works Ovation frames, height adjustable, with a blush acoustic screen and a timber pedestal, and the task chair is a Herman Miller Aeron. That end of the brief has nothing to do with how the firm looks and everything to do with how long someone can sit. A boardroom chair holds a person for ninety minutes. A task chair holds a lawyer through a filing deadline, and the specification that answers one does not answer the other.

Supplying both ends from one place is the point of a job like this. The custom tables, the leather, the Ovation frames and the Aerons arrived on one programme, against one set of drawings, and the finishes were reconciled once rather than three times by three suppliers each convinced their timber was the right one.