Offices that try too hard to look like homes tend to end up resembling neither. The more interesting brief, increasingly rare, is the one that lets a workspace remain a workspace, and then asks what kind of personality it might be allowed to develop on its own terms. Chromatic confidence, sculptural gesture, a willingness to host the unexpected – these are not residential softeners. They are a workspace’s way of stating its temperament.
On the seventh floor of a tower in Vadodara, the office of Ark Golden India Pvt. Ltd. takes that proposition seriously. Designed by Studio Karigari across 3,300 square feet, with principal designer Prashant Gurjar leading the brief, the interiors hold an open-plan logic: a central reception bay flanked by private cabins on one side and meeting rooms on the other. The shell is straightforward. What the studio does inside it is not.
The lounge that greets visitors is the project’s most restrained gesture, and arguably its most disciplined. A long upholstered sofa in subtle stripe, two slate-blue armchairs and a low wooden coffee table compose a tableau that reads as confidently corporate rather than performatively casual. The metal-framed open shelving behind, punctuated by deep aubergine boxes, doubles as display and as quiet partition, a workspace that admits to being one without apologising for it.
The reception is where the project’s argument fully announces itself. A dark, vertically stacked brick volume sits atop a sweeping blue painted plinth, its cresting curve echoing a low blue column that rises behind. The geometry is unmistakable: a workspace willing to be sculptural at its threshold.
Read from the side, the reception’s choreography reveals more. The blue floor plinth bleeds outward in a soft tonal pool, the blue painted curve rises behind the counter as a sinuous wave, and an angular pendant light hovers at an angle that feels almost conversational. Behind it all, the lounge sofa is visible through the threshold, framed by slatted vertical fins.
““The cyan flowing from the rear structural building columns becomes the ground for central reception and workspaces, a bold micro concrete finished feature that ties the space together, weaving disparate elements into a harmonious whole.””
Past the reception, the central workstation island is where the design’s chromatic logic turns architectural. A long red pendant beam paired with a sculptural woven canopy runs the length of the desks, its silhouette referencing the studio’s crocodilian-inspired fixture: gauzy stretched fabric set into a hard outer shell. Below it, a line illustration mural and a folk figurine on a pedestal sit comfortably alongside ergonomic task chairs and single computer monitors.
From the opposite end, the same workstation bay reads as a continuous spatial event. The painted curve resolves itself into the pale blue curved wall at one end and dissolves into glass-and-mullion partitions at the other, and the suspended pendant becomes the unmistakable centreline of the room. A circular glass hoop punctuates the desk run, half sculpture, half acoustic gesture.
Detail rewards a closer look. The structural columns, painted in pale cyan and detailed with perforated mild-steel plate fins, are treated as objects rather than obstacles, and the sculptural figurine on its woven base reads almost as a guardian of the workstation island. A textured ceiling band runs overhead, soft, tactile, and unexpected in a corporate setting.
The boardroom, glass-enclosed at the far end, takes a different position altogether. A long stone-topped table sits beneath a generous oval ceiling light, addressed by a wall-mounted screen on one side and a recessed credenza in dark-stained wood on the other. The chromatic confidence of the workstation bay is deliberately withdrawn here. The room is a study in neutrality, designed to let the conversation, not the interior, do the talking.
The private cabins occupy the more domestic register of the office. A wide desk in light wood, fronted with perforated mild-steel detailing, sits opposite a tall open shelving wall whose lower cabinets are faced in a warm terracotta tone. The cabin functions as a focused workspace, but the terracotta gesture, restrained and singular, is enough to mark it as belonging to the same chromatic family as the reception.
A second cabin shows the studio’s restraint more clearly. The desk is similar in proportion, the perforated metal front identical, and the wall behind holds a single tall artwork that does most of the room’s emotional work. The composition refuses to over-decorate, allowing the city view through the long window and the artwork’s quiet narrative to share the room.
A closer view of the same desk surface clarifies the studio’s material thinking. The stone top reads as solid and substantial, the perforated metal apron drapes almost like fabric, and a small globe sits on the credenza behind, the kind of object that looks incidental but anchors the room’s sense of scale and intent.
One of the office’s most considered moments lives in a quieter corner: a tall pinboard panel featuring an illustration, slid in front of an open storage wall in dark-stained wood. The kitchen-island-adjacent counter in the foreground hints at a pantry zone. It is the rare workspace detail that earns its narrative without raising its voice.
What Studio Karigari has built is a workspace that refuses to choose between sobriety and personality. The cyan painted plinth, the dark brick reception, the sculptural pendant, the folk figurine on its pedestal, these are not decorative concessions to a residential mood. They are an argument that a chemical-innovation company can occupy an office that thinks visually, sources locally, and still functions with corporate clarity.
In a city whose contemporary commercial interiors often default to glass-and-grey neutrality, Ark Office proposes a different register: one in which openness meets intimacy, colour meets calm, and flow meets restraint. The discipline lies not in the boldness of the gestures, but in how few of them the studio allowed itself.
