Close to Home: Chiltern House, Our Marlow Office Project

Chiltern House is a full office interior in Marlow, our own home town, and it's the project we're closing out this run of studio posts with. The brief covered a full workplace environment end to end: reception, open plan desking, meeting rooms and breakout space, all needed to work together as one building rather than a set of separately designed rooms.

"Characterful but functional" gets said about a lot of office fit outs and means very little most of the time. For Chiltern House it meant something specific: every space had to support a working day that repeats five times a week, fifty weeks a year, without the design ever becoming wallpaper that staff stop noticing. That's a harder brief than a one off reception or an exhibition stand that lasts three days. A space people use every day has to hold up to repetition.

We built the material and colour language once, at the start, and then applied it consistently across every room type in the building. The same timber tones and detailing that give the reception its first impression carry through into the desking areas and meeting rooms, so the building reads as one coherent design decision rather than a front of house treatment that fades the further you walk from the entrance.

Function still came first wherever the two pulled in different directions. Desking layouts were driven by how the teams actually work, meeting rooms were sized and specified around real usage rather than an idealised version of it, and breakout spaces were placed where people would actually use them during a working day, not where they'd look best in a photograph. Character had to sit on top of a layout that genuinely worked, not the other way round.

Working close to home changes the relationship with a project a little. We pass Chiltern House, and we'll see the space get used and lived in over years rather than handed over and forgotten. That's a useful discipline to carry into every other interior we design, wherever it happens to be.

It felt right to end this run of studio posts here, close to Marlow, with a project built for people using it every single working day.