The client is one of the world’s most established investment management firms, with a long and respected pedigree and offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia. For its new London home the company consolidated its operations into a single landmark headquarters at Paddington, occupying around 220,000 sq ft over nine floors.
The interior was designed by tp bennett as a warm, considered workplace, drawing on the building’s waterside setting to create a calm environment built around collaboration and staff wellbeing. xsign was appointed through main contractor Overbury to deliver the complete signage and wayfinding package, from arrival identity and floor navigation through to accessible room signage and glass manifestation.
The defining challenge on this project was its sheer scale, and within that, the sheer volume of glass manifestation. The scheme covers around 220,000 sq ft over nine floors of a headquarters that is glazed almost throughout, with partitions, meeting rooms and offices on every level. That meant hundreds of individual glazed screens, each needing safety and privacy manifestation, every one individually set out, measured and installed. Delivering that quantity to a single consistent standard, and to a live fit-out programme, was the heart of the job.
Scale told in the wayfinding too. A large workforce split across many teams, plus a steady flow of visitors, meant the navigation had to be immediately legible and consistent floor to floor across all nine levels, comprehensive without ever feeling corporate or cluttered.
Everything also had to disappear into a highly designed interior. The scheme is warm and tactile, with soft curves, timber, brass tones and a rippled-water motif taken from the waterways around the building, so every element, from a manifestation panel to a washroom sign, had to be tuned to a single warm metallic finish, a consistent typeface and the same quality of detail as the surrounding joinery. Inclusivity ran through the brief as well, with contemplation and prayer space, a parenting suite, medical rooms, a tech-free recharge suite, all-gender washrooms and hearing loops all needing to be supported to UK accessibility and building regulation standards, while illuminated elements set into the building’s columns and planters demanded power, concealed cabling and close coordination with other trades.
A single material language. xsign built the scheme around one quiet palette: a warm, pearl-beige metallic finish carried across every sign type, with crisp white detailing and one clean sans-serif throughout. That consistency is what lets the signage recede into the architecture while still doing its job.
Illuminated column numbers. The clearest expression of that thinking is the floor identification. Floor numbers are wrapped around the building’s structural columns as curved, back-illuminated numerals in opal acrylic, glowing a soft warm white. Cable routes are concealed within the column shroud and the fixings are tamper-proof, so what could have been a plain structural column instead becomes an elegant, self-evident floor marker.
Illuminated built-up letters. The same illuminated craft appears at the refreshment and tech points, where rimless built-up letters with opal faces are edge-lit and mounted into the joinery and planters, so the wording reads as part of the furniture rather than a sign stuck on top of it.
Wayfinding and accessible signage. Printed aluminium directional panels guide staff and visitors across the floors and between teams. Accessible room and facility signage is produced with 3D digitally printed tactile lettering and Braille, and includes neat sliding occupancy indicators for the medical and contemplation rooms so a space can quietly show whether it is free, in use, or in prayer. A considered set of pictograms covers the wellbeing spaces, from the parenting suite and library to the recharge and outside-in rooms.
Inclusive and compliance signage. The inclusive detailing goes further than most schemes attempt. Hearing-loop signage, all-gender washroom signage in blasted satin stainless steel, and a discreet ceiling-mounted direction-of-prayer indicator for the contemplation space all sit within the same visual family, alongside the required fire-action and evacuation signage.
Glass manifestation. Privacy and safety manifestation to the glazing uses clear reeded film and a softly printed rippled-water pattern that echoes the interior’s waterside motif, satisfying building control while adding to the design story rather than interrupting it.
Installation was phased and closely coordinated with Overbury across a live, multi-trade site. The illuminated elements needed the most care: power feeds and cable routing for the column numerals and the built-up lettering were coordinated early and installed once the joinery and services were in place, so nothing was compromised on finish. Feature lettering and the glass manifestation were measured and fitted on site to guarantee an exact fit against the finished architecture.
The result is a signage scheme that does two things at once. It helps a large workforce move confidently around a major new headquarters, and it reinforces the company’s investment in its people and its brand, proving that even the most functional signage can be an asset to a considered interior rather than an afterthought.
