Camille Roy
Associate, Director of Interior Design
Published
Reading
2 min read
Topic
Workplace
When Northvale asked for a headquarters that felt “less like an office”, the easy answer would have been a feature wall. We took the request more literally. In a building where four hundred people move between floors, teams and moods every day, colour can do practical work.
Colour as a map
Each floor has one colour family, used on the core walls, stair landings and signage. People rarely read room numbers; they remember “the green floor”. Within a floor, saturated colour marks the places where people meet — kitchens, project rooms, the stair — while desks and focus rooms stay calm and neutral.
Quiet floors, loud stairs
The feature stair is the brightest space in the building on purpose. It is where we wanted people to cross paths, so it is generous, daylit and impossible to miss. The lifts, by comparison, are tucked away and finished in the same pale oak as the floors.
“We stopped booking meeting rooms for quick questions. You just catch people on the stair.”
Fig. 02 — The feature stair connects all four floors
What we measured
Six months after move-in, a workplace survey and occupancy sensors told a consistent story: stair use more than doubled compared with the previous office, and the share of meetings held in informal spaces rose from 18 to 41 percent. Complaints about noise at desks fell — the loud activities had somewhere better to go.
Three rules we now use
One colour family per floor, applied to the same elements every time.
Saturated colour for shared spaces, quiet finishes where people concentrate.
Test colours in daylight on site, never only on a screen.
Colour is one of the cheapest materials in a fit-out. Used with intent, it is also one of the hardest-working.
