Office and showroom design: an interior that works for the business

How a commercial interior differs from a residential one

Apartment design answers the question of how a specific family will live there. Office, showroom or retail design answers a different question: how the business will work there. The very criterion for a project's success changes: an apartment is judged by how comfortable it is to live in, a commercial interior by whether the space solves the company's problem.

• Success is measured not by comfort, but by a business result
• Circulation is planned for many different people, not for one family
• Materials answer to regulations for public spaces and to wear resistance
• Light works as a tool, not only as atmosphere

A visitor's route, not a family's way of life

In a residential project, the designer builds the layout around a family's habits: who has breakfast where, where shoes get put away, how people head out in the morning. In a commercial project, it's built around the scenario of a stranger walking in for the first time: where they'll look at the entrance, where they'll stop, what they'll see first. At the VIONA showroom, that scenario is short — the client has to see the fabric, feel the texture, sit down at a table with a catalogue — the whole route fits into a few steps within 86 m². At the 500 m² Qoople office, there are several scenarios running in parallel: for an employee, for a visitor, for a partner heading to a meeting room with a sea view — and the layout has to keep them apart without creating a crush.

Regulations, approvals and material wear resistance

A commercial space carries its own set of requirements that an apartment doesn't: fire regulations for public spaces, calculated evacuation routes, ventilation sized for the density of people per square metre. Materials get chosen differently too: a floor in a zone with a constant flow of visitors has to withstand abrasion for years, not a season. At the ASTROOM interiors centre, that shows in the choice of finishes itself — stone and concrete aren't an aesthetic gesture there, but a material chosen for the daily load of a retail space.

Light as a function, not atmosphere

In an apartment, light sets the mood in the evening. In a commercial interior, it's first and foremost a tool: in a showroom, it decides whether a client sees the true colour of the fabric before buying; in a meeting room, whether eyes get tired over a two-hour meeting; in a sales office, how clearly an apartment layout reads on a consultant's tablet. Atmosphere is still there, but it's secondary to the task.

A company office: the space carries the brand identity

The Qoople office in Alanya — 500 m² across three floors, completed in 2024 with a full cycle from the design project through to design supervision. The task wasn't a decorative one: to tie spaces with very different functions — a representative lobby with a sea view, an open-plan work area, offices, break-out zones — together under a single material code, so the office would read as one company, not a set of unrelated rooms.

The code rests on three materials — warm walnut, marble, graphite — and on one compositional device: a Slamp ceiling lighting system runs through the lobby, the bar and the break-out zones, visually stitching them into a single line even as the walls and the purpose of each room change. Sliding partitions let the open-plan area be reconfigured for different ways of working without touching the finishes.

How many workstations fit without losing comfort

The question that most often comes up when commissioning an office design is how many people can actually fit into the space without it feeling cramped. The answer depends not just on the floor area, but on how many closed offices the project has against open-plan space, whether meeting rooms need a fixed capacity, and how often the team's headcount changes. In the 500 m², three-floor office, this is solved by zoning by function — open workstations on one level, representative and meeting spaces on another — rather than by trying to pack everyone into a single volume.

A developer's sales office: working on two levels at once

A housing developer's sales office — 94 m², completed in 2022. This is its own genre within commercial design: the space has to sell to the client and remain a working environment for the team at the same time. A client who walks in to choose an apartment needs to get an impression of the developer's reliability within minutes; a staff member who spends eight hours here needs an actual workstation, not a stage set.

How a sales office differs from an ordinary office

Four zones with different jobs fit into a compact footprint: an open-plan area with arched recesses, a client waiting zone, a meeting room with an oval table for signing contracts, and a separate office. The palette — light, neutral, with graphite and bright-yellow accents — works to make the developer's brand recognisable at the entrance, rather than acting as a general backdrop. An ordinary corporate office has no need to impress a passer-by within the first few seconds; a sales office does, and that reorders the priorities of the project from the very first sketch.

Similar logic underlies show apartments for developers: showing the product so the decision to buy gets made on the spot rather than put off. A sales office and a show apartment solve the same commercial problem through different means — the office through the impression of the brand at the entrance, the show apartment through direct contact with the future home.

A showroom: why light matters more than finishes

The VIONA interior textile showroom — 86 m², completed in 2019. The main difficulty of this genre is the sheer volume of stock: rolls of fabric, catalogues and accessories all need to be within a consultant's reach, without turning the room into a warehouse.

The solution is open shelving around the perimeter, with the centre of the room left free for a large oval table where fabric is unrolled and catalogues are flicked through. A mirrored wall and a panoramic window visually push out the boundaries of a compact room, keeping it from feeling cramped even with stock packed in tightly.

Light that decides whether someone buys

In a showroom, lighting isn't a decorative layer, it's part of the product. If the light distorts colour, a client sees the fabric wrong and ends up at home with something different from what they chose in the showroom. That's why the lighting scenario at VIONA is calculated for accurate colour rendering and material texture rather than for setting a mood — unlike a residential interior, where evening light works first and foremost on atmosphere.

A large-scale retail interior: navigation without signage

The ASTROOM interiors centre — a multi-storey retail space completed in 2018. The task here was the reverse of a residential project: not to create cosiness, but to organise an open showroom space with no internal partitions, so a visitor could find their own way around without an excess of signage — signs and pointers that would get in the way of seeing the products themselves.

Navigation is built into the very structure of the interior: the dialogue between natural stone and textured concrete, and a black-graphite dominant in the finishes, set the direction of movement through a change of material and light, rather than through signs. Everything in the interior serves one goal: showing the products on display.

Where a commercial interior design project begins

The difference between a residential and a commercial project shows up as early as the brief. Instead of a conversation about a family's habits, it's a conversation about the company's business processes: how many staff, how the client flow is organised, which regulations apply to this type of space, and what brand identity the finishes need to support. From there, it's the same full cycle as in residential projects: a design project, design supervision, and, where needed, the selection of materials and equipment able to withstand a commercial load.

The ARTEVRIKA studio has been working since 2006 and takes on offices and showrooms as well as public interiors and demonstration spaces for developers — different genres, but one principle: the interior solves the business problem first, and the aesthetics get built around it.