Kier Property took a 1990s office building on Cornwall Street back to its frame and rebuilt it as 19 Cornwall Street: around 139,000 sq ft of Grade A workspace across ground and six upper floors, delivered by main contractor Kier Construction to a design by Associated Architects. It completed in 2025 as one of the most sustainable office buildings in the city, all-electric and net zero carbon in operation, EPC A rated, and targeting BREEAM Excellent, WELL Gold and a NABERS 5-star rating.
The interior is deliberately quiet. The original concrete frame was exposed and sensitively restored, set against warm oak joinery and a curved fluted timber wall that runs the length of reception in deep bottle green. xsign was appointed to deliver the signage and wayfinding scheme across the whole building, from the reception directory down to the lowest level of the car park.
A back-to-frame redevelopment gives signage far more surfaces to land on than a new build does. At 19 Cornwall Street the same family of details had to sit on smooth plaster in the cores, restored exposed concrete, brickwork at the roof terrace threshold, full-height glazing at both lift cores, oak-veneered joinery on every door, the fluted timber slat wall in reception, painted structure two levels below ground in the car park, and the fronts of 74 lockers. A detail that works beautifully on one of those can look like an afterthought on the next.
The building was also being let while it was being finished. When the specification was signed off, every line of the reception directory still read “tenant name to be confirmed”, and the first occupiers were only added in a later revision. That ruled out a bonded graphic panel from the start: whatever went into reception had to be changeable by the building’s own team, repeatedly, without leaving a mark.
Everything else firmed up late in the same way. The specification reached version 12 before anything went into production, and it kept moving after that. The locker schedule grew from 50 doors to 74, the reception palette was still unresolved when the drawings were issued, and the building’s typeface changed once the identity settled. A site survey also picked up two ground-floor wayfinding positions that were not shown on the issued plans at all.
The primary wayfinding family is a single idea, repeated. Each panel is 3mm frosted acrylic with a fine matt face and a high-polished edge, reverse-coated in black, with the floor number, destinations and directional arrows cut clean through to an oak veneer panel behind, so the lettering reads as warm timber against black rather than as printed text. One corner of every panel is chamfered, which gives the family a signature without adding any decoration. Seventeen panels run from ground to level six, including the fifth-floor roof terrace.
Built to be re-let. Those panels are carried on xsign’s patented Jigsaw™ modular system, a concealed wall rail holding lockable, interchangeable panels. Nothing is bonded to the wall, and any panel can be swapped in minutes without touching the substrate or the fixings. The reasoning is simple: a wayfinding scheme in a multi-let building should survive its first re-letting.
Reception. Reception is the exception, and it is bespoke. The directory is built from machined aluminium flat bar finished in a bottle green at a low sheen, so the shelves read as part of the fluted timber wall rather than as an object hung on it. Freestanding letters, profile-cut from 5mm aluminium and coated in a warm yellow, sit in a rebate along each shelf and lift straight out by hand. Floors G to 6 and Suites A, B and C are all listed, and a tenant change is a set of letters rather than a new sign.
The working building. The same discipline carries into the parts of the building most schemes give up on: slim frosted acrylic door signs with crisp white lettering on the oak doors to the cycle store, drying room, studio, bin store and FM office; frosted acrylic numerals across all 74 changing room and cycle store lockers, in three sizes so they sit correctly on doors of different heights; large single-numeral floor indicators in the lift lobbies; tamper-resistant printed vinyl on the north and south core glazing, listing what sits beyond it; and large-format car park graphics up to 3.1 metres wide directing drivers to reception and out to Great Charles Queensway. The statutory layer, fire action, no smoking or vaping and no idling vehicles, was produced to the same black and white standard rather than bought off the shelf, so compliance does not undo the design.
The scheme was surveyed on site and installed in phases as the fit-out released each area, working to the Kier Construction programme. Setting out the reception directory across a curved fluted wall meant coordinating with the joinery package rather than resolving it at the wall, because every shelf had to land on the slats, sit level, and keep its anchors hidden. The core vinyls went onto glazing already installed in a live circulation route, and the car park graphics were applied at full size to previously painted structure two levels below ground.
xsign returned to site in 2026 for a second package as letting progressed. The reception directory was rebuilt with its first named tenants, the locker run was extended, and further car park signage was added, all using the original details and with no remedial work to the walls. The building reads the way it was designed to, and it will keep reading that way as its occupiers change.
