WentWest, Western Sydney

WentWest runs the Western Sydney Primary Health Network, and its people spend a good part of the week in general practices, hospitals and community services rather than at a desk. The floor is planned for that. There is a base of workstations, but the settings that carry the day are the ones you can sit down at for an hour and leave.

The clearest of those are the curved acoustic touchdown pods on the window line. Each one is a single upholstered shell wrapped around a timber top, a monitor on an arm and a task chair, set on a circular carpet inset. The shell is high enough to take the sightline and the reflected sound from the glazing, and open enough that the pod does not need a door or a booking.

Meeting rooms are deliberately light. Timber legged tables with thin tops and white framed chairs on castors, so a room can be reset by whoever is in it. The larger rooms take a long table and ten to twelve chairs, the smaller ones a six seat table against an acoustic panelled wall.

The social settings do double duty, because this is an organisation that hosts as much as it meets. Booths with navy upholstery and timber chairs take a working lunch or an external visitor without turning it into a meeting room booking, and a circular ottoman wrapped around a structural column gives the arrival area somewhere to sit that is not a waiting room.

At the centre of the floor a curved banquette, round oak topped tables and drum ottomans with leather pulls sit on a round carpet inset under an acoustic disc. It is the one setting on the floor that can be pulled apart and put back together by hand, which is what makes it the one that gets used for everything.