Mirvac, 400 George Street Sydney

Mirvac's workplace at 400 George Street sits high above the Sydney CBD, with long window lines looking north to the harbour. The brief was a floor that could carry the full range of a working day: heads-down desks, formal meetings, informal catch-ups, and the kind of space people choose to eat lunch in rather than leave the building for. Geneva supplied the loose furniture across the collaborative, meeting, boardroom and breakout areas.

The interior works in two registers. Pale timber battens, travertine and terracotta tile carry the social end of the floor, while the work floor stays quieter and more restrained. The furniture had to move between the two without announcing the change, so the scheme reads as one decision rather than a series of separate purchases. That meant holding a narrow palette, timber, black steel and a short list of upholstery, and letting the scale of the pieces do the work instead of the finish.

Most of the settings are expected to do more than one job. The breakout takes a team meeting at eleven and lunch at one without being reset in between, which is why the communal table is a single long run rather than a cluster of smaller tables: one long table absorbs a group of nine and a pair of people at the far end equally well. The acoustic panelling behind the banquette is what lets that happen a few metres from the open plan.

Sightlines were the other constraint. Lounge seating sits low against the rendered walls and timber screening so the view through the floor stays open, and the circulation route is marked overhead with oversized fabric pendants rather than with anything at eye height. On a floor this long, keeping the loose furniture under the sightline is what stops it reading as clutter from the moment you step out of the lift.

The meeting rooms were specified for how long people actually sit in them. The boardroom takes high back chairs on castors rather than the lighter stacking chairs that often end up in these rooms, and the smaller rooms carry the same family of seating at a reduced scale, so a client moving between rooms is not moving between schemes.

The tea point and the perching settings get used in ten minute bursts. Upholstered stools on bronze frames run along the dark joinery bench over a terracotta tile floor, and high tables elsewhere on the floor give people somewhere to stand and work without booking a room. These are the pieces that turn over most often in a day, which is where wear shows first.