Universal-Investment is a German financial services company and one of Europe's largest fund platforms. Its Kraków office occupies 3,000 m² in the High5ive building, with 300 workstations across two floors.
Visitors arrive into a generous, café-like space with a wide choice of places to work, talk and meet — a deliberate inversion of the usual arrangement, where a reception is somewhere you wait rather than somewhere anything happens. Conference rooms and quiet, focused settings sit immediately alongside. The social areas were placed where the windows look out over the historic centre of Kraków.
The hardest part of the design was reconciling two expectations pulling in opposite directions. The client wanted an interior with an individual, non-standard character; but at the same time - calm and with a profile fitting a financial company.
The resolution was to make grey the base, contrast it with cool blue, and move all of the project's boldness into pattern — geometric wallpapers and carpets that give the space energy without raising its voice. Natural wood warms it; commissioned works by Polish artists Tomasz Opaliński and Sonia Hensler complete it.
Furniture by Kinnarps.
