Seventy thousand square feet is a significant amount of space to make feel coherent. For McKinsey & Company’s new head office in Gurugram, Ultraconfidentiel Design resolved this not through a single dominant gesture but through a design logic that runs consistently from the reception to the deepest workstation bay: a palette of dark wood veneer, light oak, black steel, grey marble, and dense tropical planting, held together by a freeform white LED installation that threads through the entire floor plate like a continuous drawn line.
That installation is the first thing you register on arrival. Moving through the reception, the ceiling shifts between warm wood slats and exposed black-painted slab, and across both surfaces the white LED tubes loop and curve in organic, unbroken forms, their glow steady and cool against the warmth of everything below. The effect from a distance is of something between a light fitting and a drawing, the lines too fluid to read as architectural and too deliberate to read as accidental. They establish the character of the floor before anything else does.
The reception itself is organized around a courtyard, carried across from McKinsey’s previous environment and reinterpreted here as the spatial and emotional center of the new office. A black steel and light oak pergola structure frames a still, dark water feature set into the black marble floor, the reflective surface doubling the planting that surrounds it: banana leaf plants, areca palms, ferns, and ground-level tropical growth filling the black planters on all sides. A timber bench seat within the pergola offers a place to pause that reads more like a garden than a waiting area. The grey veined marble flooring of the reception runs into and around this installation, the contrast between the hard reflective stone and the living density of the planting giving the arrival sequence a quality that most office lobbies of this scale do not manage: genuine calm. The McKinsey name sits on the full-height dark wood-veneered wall to one side, the identity present without needing to dominate.
From reception, the floor opens into a social library and lounge zone where the ceiling shifts again, the wood slats giving way to the exposed grey concrete slab, with the LED installation continuing through it. Blue sectional sofas and terracotta-orange single sofas occupy this zone in separate groupings, divided by the wood-clad columns with black steel bases that appear throughout the floor plate, each column base planted with a tall areca palm in a black cylindrical pot. The planting is not decorative in the way office planting usually is. It is dense and varied enough to function as a spatial element, the palms and banana leaves creating visual boundaries between zones without walls or partitions, the green moving through the space as a continuous thread from reception through to the workstation floor.
Within the social library, a compact private phone pod sits against the bookshelf wall: a fully enclosed unit with a rounded black and white frame, lit internally, and a desk surface inside. The shelving behind it holds books, ceramics, and small objects alongside trailing plants, the grey marble panels of the wall giving the library zone a material weight that distinguishes it from the softer lounge areas around it.
The café counter, finished in light oak fluted panels with a black marble top and open shelving above displaying ceramics, plants, and a few books, sits under the most concentrated section of the white LED installation; the freeform tubes are particularly dense above this counter, its black ceiling making the white lines more vivid here than anywhere else on the floor. Two tan leather tulip stools are at the counter. It is the social infrastructure of the office, and it looks the part.
The meeting rooms run along the perimeter in a glazed corridor of black steel framed glass walls, the rooms behind them distinguished by internal acoustic panels in cream fluted fabric, wood slat ceilings, and in one smaller room a single yellow upholstered armchair alongside a standing-height worktop, an informal meeting room that sits between a conversation space and a private focus room. The main boardroom carries a long white conference table and black task chairs, a presentation screen at one end, the window behind it letting in the views of the highway and city skyline that the brief describes. Between the meeting rooms, in the corridor, dense tropical planting fills black troughs, the large leaves visible through the glass walls of the rooms, so that even in a formal meeting the greenery is present in the peripheral vision of everyone at the table.
The workstation floor is straightforward in its organisation: long benching runs with light surfaces and grey upholstered task chairs, acoustic screen panels between positions keeping the noise down without blocking sightlines. Black linear pendants run in parallel above the workstation banks, the ceiling here exposed concrete. Glass-partitioned rooms with warm amber tinted glazing line one side of the workstation floor, the amber giving those rooms a visual warmth that distinguishes them from the open floor while keeping the transparency that the design maintains throughout. Along the circulation spine between workstations and enclosed rooms, bar-height counters in light oak with white bar stools offer an alternative to desk working, the locker bank in dark timber behind them, a framed artwork on the wall, an elliptical white LED ring above. The phone pods appear again here in a line down the corridor, the palms continuing between them.
Handpicked marbles, bold wood veneers, Andreu World and Steelcase furniture, Interface flooring, Dorma partition systems, and Regent and Luz lighting. The material and product specification is consistent with the floor’s overall ambition: every element is chosen to perform well and last well; nothing is present for effect alone.
Fact File
Designed by: Ultraconfidentiel Design
Project Type: Office Interior Design
Project Name: McKinsey & Company
Location: Delhi NCR
Project Size: 70,000 sq ft
Client: McKinsey & Company
Scope: Design & Build
Lighting: Regent Light, Luz Light
Partition System: Dorma
Flooring: Interface
Furniture: Andreu World, Steelcase, Howorth, MMA
Photography Courtesy: Jeetin Sharma
