TPG Telecom, Adelaide

This is TPG Telecom's Adelaide floor, and Geneva supplied all the furniture on it: the café and meeting tables, the electric sit to stand workstations, the task and meeting chairs, the booths, the banquettes, the lounge chairs, the ottomans, the coffee and laptop tables, the stools, the lockers, the mobile whiteboards and the acoustic booths.

The lockers are the tell. A bank of numbered personal lockers near the entry means people do not have assigned desks, and once you see that, every other decision on the floor follows from it. An activity based floor is not a style. It is a trade: you give up the desk you can leave your things on, and in exchange the building owes you somewhere better to work for each different kind of work you do.

That debt is paid in settings, and this floor has a lot of them. A café table long enough for a dozen stools. Banquettes upholstered into timber plinths along the windows. A curved booth around a round table. Modular bench blocks that can be pushed into any arrangement. Lounge chairs with round tables. High tables with wire stools. A timber laptop bar with power along the glass. Meeting rooms with timber tables, acoustic booths that are not rooms at all, and a long oval table under an open timber frame in the middle of the floor. Count the ways to sit down and the number is closer to fifteen than five.

The second consequence is acoustic. Take away assigned desks and people move, which means conversation moves with them, and on a telecommunications floor the conversation is mostly a phone call. Enclosure has to be bought rather than built: Framery booths dropped into the open plan, high backed booth seating, mobile whiteboards doing double duty as screens. None of it is base build, all of it can be relocated, and that is deliberate on a floor that will be re-planned before the lease is up.

The third is that almost everything moves. Ottomans with leather pull straps, whiteboards on castors, bench blocks in modules, a screen on a mobile stand, task chairs on castors. The only genuinely fixed furniture is the banquette seating set into the joinery, and even that is at the perimeter where the plan is least likely to change.

The colour is worth a note. Terracotta, deep red, navy, olive, magenta and teal, used in small quantities against grey carpet, pale timber and white. It is more colour than most workplace fitouts carry and it works because it is all in the loose furniture, where it can be replaced piece by piece rather than repainted.