Menulog, Sydney

Menulog's Sydney office is the clearest example on this blog of a brand colour being taken out of the paint and put into the furniture. Geneva supplied everything on the floor: the boardroom and meeting tables, the long and high tables, the booth and banquette seating, the loose seating for the tiered town hall, the chairs, the stools, the occasional tables and the lockers.

In most fitouts the brand colour lives in paint, vinyl and graphics, and there is a good reason for that. Paint is the cheapest thing in the room to change, so it carries the risk. Furniture is the most expensive and the longest lived, so it is usually kept safe and neutral, and the brand is applied to the surfaces around it.

Here it runs the other way. The tables sit on orange frames. The perimeter bench is orange. The banquette is piped in orange. The table bases are orange. The lockers are faced in it. A rebrand would be an expensive morning, and the specification was written knowing that.

What keeps it from becoming a novelty is a rule applied consistently: the colour is structural and never the working surface. Legs, frames, edges, bases and piping are orange. Every top is timber or white. The effect is that the orange reads as an outline drawn around the room rather than as a field somebody has to sit and look at for three hours, and it survives being seen every day, which is the only real test.

The rest of the floor is an agile plan of the familiar kind. Personal lockers rather than assigned desks, a tiered town hall for the all hands, booths and banquettes for the conversations that do not need a room, high tables at the glass, and meeting rooms at the perimeter with the view. What is unusual is not the plan but that a single package of furniture carries the brand across all of it without a single novelty piece.

The one thing worth taking from this project if you are specifying your own: decide early whether the brand lives in the paint or in the furniture, and then commit. A floor with a branded wall and neutral furniture reads as a fitout. A floor with neutral walls and branded furniture reads as a company. What does not work is half of each, which is what most floors end up with because the two decisions were made by different people at different times.