Your workspace is an excellent opportunity to showcase your brand and culture to prospective staff and clients, as well as affirm it to your people every day. As the element of your workspace that your people interact with the most often, furniture has an essential role to play in representing and affirming your company’s meaning, both subconsciously and consciously.
It’s crucial that the design of your workspace has the right balance of personality and professionalism to reflect and enhance your company brand and culture. This is not only the furniture itself within your space – the type, the design style, and the finishes. It extends to the layout of the whole space, and how your furniture interacts with the people in the space.
Effectively utilising furniture in your space can create a cohesive experience that can make a real difference for your people every day, reflecting and enhancing the culture and brand of your company. Your goals, identity and beliefs can be communicated to staff and clients alike through careful furniture design and curation.
We’ve selected 5 of the most popular design styles of office furniture, and broken down what they say about you, and how you can make sure you’re sending the right message to clients and employees alike.
Modern Office Design
Modern office design has a clean and uncluttered aesthetic. With a focus on minimalist shapes, personality can be communicated through the addition of biophilia and brand graphics. The go-to starting style for most workspaces today, this can become very bland if not enough personality is added, dampening creativity and innovation.
The modern office design focuses on keeping things simple, avoiding unnecessarily ornate elements and loads of accessories. This clutters the space and leaves the design (and your people) muddled. With a cool colour scheme predominantly featuring cool, neutral shades along with a pop of brand-based signage and furniture, this is an undistracted design that enables focus and clear thinking.
Rustic Office Design
While modern workspace design is cool and uncluttered, rustic is contrastingly warm and worn. This style utilises a natural colour palette of creams, greys, and browns along with natural leather and aged wood to warm up space and set that comfortable but professional tone. For areas where you want energy and creativity, you can add accents of colour with feature walls, try on-trend mustard or fresh green for an Insta-worthy brainstorming room.
With a welcoming rural feel, this design trend can recreate a domestic atmosphere, making your people comfortable and secure. Rustic design is certainly not for every brand, and it would likely be inappropriate for firms in the software and technology sectors. However, for brands trying to create a relaxed, domestic atmosphere, this design is worth considering.
Industrial Office Design
The industrial workspace design trend has become increasingly popular over the last few years, as companies look to differentiate themselves from corporate office design. Featuring a unique blend of metallic and wooden and materials, industrial design embraces the utilitarian style of many office buildings built in the last century, such as exposed brickwork and metal structures.
This wood and metal aesthetic can create a raw room tone that can be rather stale if not complemented by biophilic elements or other complementary colours. However, if these colours are not used very carefully, it can leave a space looking synthetic or fake. A truly industrial design that creates the feeling of an old-fashioned factory will create a trendy and slightly quirky impression in the minds of your visitors and staff, promoting collaboration.
Traditional Office Design
A design style that looks like it came out of Westminster Palace or a barrister’s chambers. This high-class style is visually impressive and amazingly comfortable, whilst being relatively easy to achieve in most spaces. The warm brown woods, ornate panelling and nail-studded leather give the space an elegant and even opulent feeling of luxury.
This style could appear too elaborate in a large open plan space and is generally used for smaller boutique spaces and executive suites. However, the classic combination of dark leather, warm wood, and ornate detailing sends a very clear message about your brand, clearly stating reliability and high quality.
Transitional Office Design
Nearly every workspace is a combination of 2 or more of the above design styles rather than just a single theme. The most popular combination is between traditional and modern, known as transitional design. The cool, understated colour scheme of the typical modern office could not be more different from the rich, luxurious tone of the traditional office. Transitional design brings the two together with some eye-catching results, such as bold block colours with warmer wood and leather tones side-by-side.
Many companies find the modern office design too featureless and cold for their brand, while the traditional seems unnecessarily complicated and outdated. Combining the two provides scope to accurately reflect your brand and culture, reflecting and enhancing the personality of your business and people.
How to communicate your brand through furniture
No two companies are the same, and no two workspaces should be either. In order to get the best out of your people, they need to be surrounded by a spatial embodiment of what your company is and what it is trying to achieve, only then will your people produce their best work.
By considering every aspect of your company, you are then able to work with office designers and consultants to translate that vision into a space that perfectly matches who you are.
With a strong background in workspace design as well as workspace furniture, our team will be able to guide you through the entire process; defining the initial brief, developing an agreed budget, coordinating furniture audits, creating a furniture schedule, organising furniture mock-ups, trials, and showroom tours, and then advising on bespoke options, finishes and fabrics to create your dream workspace.
Get in touch today to find out how we can help you create a workspace that accurately showcases your brand and culture.