At Khaitan & Co’s new Gurgaon office, Workplace Curators reinterprets the traditional law office, replacing opacity and hierarchy with transparency, light, and a carefully calibrated sense of openness.
For decades, the law office has embodied authority through weight and enclosure— solid doors, rich timber finishes, and private chambers that conveyed confidence through restraint. At Khaitan & Co’s new 18,000 sq. ft. office in Gurgaon, designed and delivered by Workplace Curators, this long-standing archetype is thoughtfully reimagined. Instead of relying on what is hidden, the workspace expresses the stature of one of India’s oldest and most respected law firms through openness, clarity, and a deliberate act of revealing.
Explaining the design concept, Valentin Blanchard, Principal Designer, Workplace Curators Pvt. Ltd. Adds, “For Workplace Curators, the plan is governed by a single idea: the calibrated threshold. In place of the familiar binary of open floor and sealed cabin, the interior unfolds as a gradient of enclosure. Full height glass volumes, framed in slim black metal, carry the spatial argument – defining rooms without closing them, holding acoustic privacy while allowing sightlines and daylight to travel uninterrupted. The floor reads as continuous space rather than a sequence of doors. Movement through it is legible; one always understands where one stands and what lies beyond. In a profession built on discretion, Workplace Curators uses transparency here as the more assured gesture.”
Materiality is treated as structure rather than surface. Warm walnut grounds the plan and carries the gravitas the practice has earned across its history. Marble appears as moments of permanence, and in two distinct registers: a dramatically veined black stone for the surfaces that command attention, and a calm grey stone for the planes that frame and recede. Black metal draws the fine lines – crisp reveals, slender profiles, the precise edges that give minimalism its rigour. Against this restraint, textured carpet and tan leather soften the institutional register, steering the interior away from both the coldness of corporate glass and the heaviness of the traditional chamber.
In the hands of Workplace Curators, the palette settles into a more difficult middle ground: composed, tactile, and distinctly human. Light is the organising medium. Workplace Curators sequences the glass partitions so that daylight migrates inward from the perimeter rather than terminating at the corner offices, dissolving the old hierarchy in which the view belonged only to rank. The effect is spatial as much as atmospheric – clarity is shared across the floor. The interior breathes through contrast, not ornament.
Reception is conceived not as a lobby but as a statement of arrival, where the project’s thesis is set in miniature. Its centrepiece is a sculptural reception desk in deeply veined black marble, its curved end softening an otherwise rigorous geometry, set against a serene grey stone wall that carries the firm’s name and its founding year, 1911. The contrast – dark stone against light, mass against calm – is the building’s first and clearest statement of intent. Beside it, a backlit walnut library wall displays bound statute volumes, a quiet anchor of heritage and warmth against the cool stone.
The defining gesture, however, is the landscaped garden set into the floor: rock, pebble, moss and sculpted bonsai composed against a dark textured wall. Architecturally it does far more than decorate. It introduces nature as a counterpoint to the institutional register, slowing the visitor and softening the passage from outside to within. Composed with restraint – balance, asymmetry and negative space treated as principles rather than props – it reads as a moment of meditation. Here, Workplace Curators bring together permanence, transparency, precision and calm in a single, carefully composed arrival space.
“If the rooms hold the argument, the corridors stage it. The principal axis is shaped by a sweeping black fluted wall that curves the passage into a soft arc, played against warm timber panelling and a polished travertine floor lit by a continuous recessed glow at its base. What could have been mere transit becomes an experience of compression and release – the dark, tactile curve drawing the visitor forward toward light. It is the project’s most overtly architectural move, and one that reflects Workplace Curators’ belief that restraint is a matter of choreography, not absence.” says Valentin Blanchard.
The boardroom is where the firm’s authority is exercised, and the most composed space in the plan. Its defining gesture is the black marble conference table, its dramatic white veining running the length of the room in a single, deliberate figure. Architecturally it sets the room’s axis and gives every seat an equal relationship to the whole – a quiet argument about the practice itself: natural material, precisely ordered, complexity resolved into clarity. Tan leather chairs warm the composition, walnut panelling and a discreetly integrated display wall carry the gravitas a decisionmaking space demands, and floor-to-ceiling glazing holds the city skyline as a backdrop. In keeping with Workplace Curators’ larger spatial strategy, glass keeps even this room in dialogue with the wider floor – privacy that never becomes opacity.
Placing the partner cabins along the glazed perimeter is, above all, a quiet efficiency decision. Each desk sits against floor-toceiling windows and an open skyline, so natural light carries the working day and reduces the pull-on artificial lighting.
For a profession defined by long hours of close reading, that daylight matters: it eases eye strain, steadies concentration, and keeps the workspace feeling alive rather than enclosed. Because the partitions are glazed, the light travels further still – passing through the cabins into the internal corridor, so circulation borrows brightness from the edge rather than leaning on the ceiling above.
The palette is tuned to carry that light. Pale ceilings and soft greys spread it gently through the plan, free of glare, while textured carpet softens reflection underfoot and quiets the floor. Against these cool, restrained surfaces, the warm walnut desking gathers the light and glows – giving every cabin a grounded, human centre within the calm, a quality that Workplace Curators sustains across the workplace.
The open working core extends the same philosophy at scale. Benched workstations are divided not by sterile screens but by black storage units topped with planting, threading greenery through the heart of the floor and tempering the deliberately exposed, services-lit ceiling above. It is an environment that takes the firm’s people as seriously as its clients – daylight, planting and order brought to the everyday desk, not reserved for the rooms where visitors are received. In this way, Workplace Curators ensures that the design language remains consistent from front-of-house spaces to the daily working environment.
At its core, the project is a contemporary reinterpretation of the legal office: a place that holds privacy and openness in genuine dialogue and performs elegance through function rather than display. Through this office, Workplace Curators presents a workplace that is not only visually restrained, but strategically composed – where minimalism is not absence, but the deliberate removal of everything that does not serve precision, atmosphere and time, until what remains becomes the statement itself.
Photographer: Rajwansh
