A good design is about maintaining a balance – a warm, protective nest must provide a window to the cold, adverse reality outside. An office interior design is just as challenging as a residential interior, sometimes more so. While you are free to divide your home into private and public spaces, you are usually obligated to intertwine them for most offices.

Our office is situated in a developing posh area of Surat city, and it took us about five months to execute this entire project. Our material palette is dichotomous – wood and metal are used in unparalled harmony.

We designed an open-plan and collaborative workspace, as opposed to one where the hierarchy of the firm imposes strict physical boundaries. We, as principal designers,wanted to be a part of our team and wanted them to feel that they are just as integral to our firm, by promoting transparency in brainstorming ideas as a collective effort. In order to facilitate unhindered conversations with clients, we had to incorporate a partition between the principal’s desk and the workstation. We came up with an ingenious idea to fabricate a metal rack that is firmly suspended from the ceiling. Built just like a wall-mountedshelf system, this structure has no support on either face. The entire weight is supported by the ceiling slab, which was devoid of any false ceiling, thus facilitating a heightened feel to this space. This floating shelf acts a library and also allows one to showcase their exotic souvenirs, artefacts and other memorabilia; without creating any visual clutter.

In our office, we wanted to build an ice breaker element that would instantly appeal to any visitor (client or vendor). We suppose they would be enthralled by the subtle mechanisms that have been utilized to fabricate this creative element. When you visualize a table, the first thing that comes to mind is a mute solid mass with inbuilt storage and utilities, supported firmly on the ground on three or more legs. However, for our office, we decided to stand apart by having the “desk” supported not on the floor but on the ceiling.

Give it a few seconds to sink in. To build this unique table, a sturdy metal sheet was suspended via a single turnbuckle support on the wall and two weight-bearing points on the ceiling. The 12mm thick sheet metal weighing over 150 kg, which is elegantly suspended on just two cables, forms a daunting spectacle. This free-standing desk appears sleek and delicate, while being completely hassle-free and is portable in case of any relocations in the future. Most importantly, it gives you ample leg space to stretch without bumping into any legs, of which there are none. The task lighting for this desk was inspired from the set squares and was designed as a horizontal cantilever beam hovering over the table, in the same lengthwise orientation as the desk, thus used as a graphical device to inculcate an illusion of a larger space. The design is not based on any particular features, but instead forms a delicately crafted composition of elements, resulting from the application of a macro-scale strategy in the micro-scale.