Nissay Wealth Life — Osaki: on the fifteenth floor every room is a colour, on the twenty-third every room is a plant

Concept

The room is the colour it is called

Naming meeting rooms is common. Painting each one the colour of its name is not. On the fifteenth floor here, sora — sky — is a pale washed blue; tsuyukusa, the dayflower, is a deeper and slightly greyer blue; matcha is exactly the green of the tea; kuwa, mulberry, is a dry yellow ochre; kyara, the aloeswood used in incense, is a warm resinous brown, and tobi, the brown of a black kite’s back, is a darker one. Benifuji, red wisteria, is the mauve you would expect.

The system holds through the rest of the floor. The free spaces are ama (flax), kurumi (walnut), shion (aster), ai (indigo) and nōkon (deep navy), and each is that colour. Even the copier alcoves are named: geppaku, moon white, and shikkoku, jet black. Twenty-three storeys up the scheme changes language entirely and the rooms take plant names — bougainvillea, mangrove, walnut, cattleya, eucalyptus — which is how you know, stepping out of the lift, which floor you are on.

01 · The entrance

Coffered, and lit indirectly

The company describes the entrance in two moves: a coffered ceiling to give the room height, and indirect lighting to keep it soft. What that produces is a curved ochre wall with the name on it and almost no hard shadow anywhere.

02 · The colour rooms

Seven, on the fifteenth floor

The fifteenth-floor meeting rooms run through a set of traditional Japanese colour names, and each room is painted its own. Sky, dayflower, matcha, mulberry, aloeswood, kite-brown, red wisteria — the same table and chairs in every one, and a different wall.

03 · The free spaces

Flax, walnut, aster, indigo, navy

The free spaces take the same treatment at a larger scale: a long table or a run of stools against a wall in the colour the room is named for. Ama is flax, kurumi walnut, shion the pale purple of an aster, and the last two are indigo and deep navy.

04 · The copy space

Even this one has a name

The copier alcoves are named as well. This is geppaku — moon white — and it is white. The other one on the floor is shikkoku, jet black.

05 · The twenty-third floor

Where the names become plants

On the twenty-third floor the naming switches language and subject: the rooms are bougainvillea, walnut, cattleya, eucalyptus and the rest. The palette follows the plants rather than a colour chart, which is why the greens up here are olive and sage rather than matcha.

06 · Under the timber ceiling

Lapis, apricot, anemone

The largest free spaces sit under a slatted timber ceiling and take the softer end of the naming: ruri, lapis, and anzu, apricot, on the fifteenth floor, and anemone on the twenty-third. Off the same floor the company keeps its own studio, used for product videos, videos for the agencies that sell its policies, and videos for staff.