Buro Happold

The Furniture Practice was appointed to specify furniture that would be similarly transparent and rigorous. In response, we found ways to creatively reuse Buro Happold’s existing furniture, as well as selecting new pieces produced within 100 miles of the site to help achieve the highest levels of sustainability.

The new Buro Happold office set itself high sustainability targets from the beginning, aiming for WELL Platinum and BREEAM Outstanding. To support the design team in achieving this goal, we developed a strategy to reuse as much furniture as possible from the client’s previous office spaces, thereby reducing the upfront carbon impact of the fit out. We analysed the exisiting audit all of Buro Happold’s existing furniture, before creating colour-coded plans with supplementary imagery to help the client visualise how the pieces might come together in different constellations within their new space. The results speak for themselves. In the new office, 74% of the task chairs, 87% of the soft seating, and 67% of the café tables have been reused from Buro Happold’s former sites – a strategy that is both environmentally efficient and cost effective.

To further Buro Happold’s vision of a sustainable, highly legible workspace, we supported Gensler with a furniture strategy that prioritised locality, with 80% of the new furniture manufactured in the UK. Of all the new designs specified for the office, the vast majority were produced within 100 miles of the site by key suppliers such as Rawside, Orangebox, Frovi and Flokk, thereby dramatically reducing the upfront carbon costs of shipping and transportation. Across the building’s four floors, of which three are high-density workspaces, the Buro Happold office tells an optimistic story about the quality and potential of manufacturing furniture in Britain, and clearly reinforces the sustainability benefits of employing local supply chains as much as possible.

Buro Happold envisaged its new home as a showcase for its design values and principles, emphasising the need for circular design, innovative construction, and truth to materials. The design team responded to this brief with a raw, industrial-style space, which was made welcoming and comfortable through a material palette rich in smoked cork, timber terrazzo, charred timber wall cladding, and joinery provided by the Furniture Practice. We also prioritised flexible, adaptable furniture that can grow and adapt with the building over time, and which ensures the wellbeing and comfort of all its residents. We provided a range of low and high desking, as well as sit stand desks, to facilitate different working options across the team, along with additional furniture that could support a full suite of spaces intended to enable collaborative work, quiet areas dedicated to wellbeing, and client-facing areas.