Featured Projects

Great design should have a strong narrative. Something to excite, inspire and engage with the people who will be the end users. This section highlights some of our projects that we feel have an interesting story behind, whether it is to do with the original big idea, our process or the final result.

ACROSS INDIA, A QUIET SHIFT IS REDEFINING HOW WE EXPERIENCE WORK. THE CITY AS AN EXTENSION OF THE WORKPLACE.

One of the most overlooked forces shaping how we work is the city itself.

In dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods, work naturally spills into the public realm. The morning coffee shop, the walk to work, informal conversations over lunch, the familiar street vendor—these rituals soften the boundary between life and labour. The workplace becomes part of a larger social and spatial ecosystem.

In contrast, when offices are pushed to the periphery of cities, accessible only by long shuttle commutes, this everyday urban fabric disappears. The burden of connection, comfort, and culture then shifts entirely onto the building.

This distinction is critical in India, where commuting is often exhausting, infrastructure is catching up, and last-mile connectivity is inconsistent. Here, the workplace cannot afford to be emotionally neutral. It must compensate for what the city cannot provide and amplify what it can.

What Our Choices in Work Environments Teach Us About Belonging

I’ve spent over a decade designing workplaces across Asia and Europe, including Broadway Malyan’s recent 154,000 sqm campus for Google in Bengaluru. Yet some of the most valuable lessons I’ve encountered have come not from large corporate developments, but from small, culturally informed work spaces.

These environments are often found within reclaimed mill buildings, converted bungalows, and hybrid café-studios where freelancers, makers, and start-ups work side by side. They were not born from strategy decks or efficiency models. They emerged from something far more instinctive to LOCAL culture: hospitality, community, and cultural intuition. And today, they offer some of the most relevant lessons for the future of workplace design.

These environments are designed around belonging, not policy:
• Soft boundaries instead of rigid floorplates
• Cultural cues instead of brand manuals
• Human rituals instead of operational rules

We applied this thinking directly in the design of Broadway Malyan’s Mumbai studio. Central to our approach was a collaboration with Direct Create and artisans from across India, resulting in a series of three traditional handwoven rugs in different weaving styles, each telling a unique visual story of the city. These pieces bring the spirit of collaboration, the makers’ narratives, and a sense of community into the everyday experience of our studio.

People don’t just work in these spaces, they identify with them. That emotional connection is precisely what many corporate workplaces struggle to achieve.

Community as a Design System

What unites India’s most successful homegrown working spaces is not a particular aesthetic, but an invisible architecture of community.

It shows up in shared kitchens that become social anchors, flexible seating that allows natural clustering, material palettes that feel domestic rather than corporate, and curated programming that blurs the line between users, guests, members, and contributors.

Together, these elements form a new workplace lexicon, one that prioritises relationships over hierarchies.

Scaling These Ideas: From Informal to Institutional

At Broadway Malyan, we’ve been actively studying these patterns globally and translating them into scalable, commercial environments.

This thinking directly shaped Google Ananta in Bengaluru, where we inverted the conventional workplace model. Instead of starting with density metrics or departmental layouts, we began with three fundamental human drivers: community, connectivity, and comfort.

This led to a campus organised around shared neighbourhoods rather than siloed floors, a central landscape spine functioning as a social street, fluid collaboration zones instead of fixed meeting rooms, natural ventilation and biophilic design to support wellbeing, and community spaces embedded into circulation rather than added as amenities.

The result is not just a high-performance workplace, but a performative ecosystem: a city within a city, designed to offset long commutes and create everyday ease.

What Comes Next?

Large organisations don’t need to imitate start-ups. But they do need to learn from their cultural agility.

The future workplace will not be defined by planning grids or furniture systems. It will be shaped by environments that scale culture, not hierarchy. Buildings that behave like communities, not assets.

As designers, our role is no longer just to optimise square metres. It is to choreograph human experience with intention, empathy, and cultural intelligence.

When we get that right, the workplace becomes more than a container for productivity. It becomes a catalyst - for wellbeing, creativity, and shared purpose.

As designers, our role is no longer just to optimise square metres. It is to choreograph human experience with intention, empathy, and cultural intelligence.

When we get that right, the workplace becomes more than a container for productivity. It becomes a catalyst - for wellbeing, creativity, and shared purpose.

Listing details

Featured Projects

Miami Cruise Terminal

Miami, USA

One St George Wharf

London, UK

Rossio Station

Lisbon, Portugal

Sarda House

Nashik, India

The Surabaya Urban Transformation Programme - "Dolly"

Surabaya, Indonesia

South Hampstead High School Performing Arts Centre

London

World of Wine

Porto, Portugal

RIBA North

Liverpool, UK

Mann Island

Liverpool, UK

East Village

Calgary, Canada

Porto Office Park

Porto, Portugal

Google Ananta

Bengaluru, India

ACROSS INDIA, A QUIET SHIFT IS REDEFINING HOW WE EXPERIENCE WORK. THE CITY AS AN EXTENSION OF THE WORKPLACE.