Tokyo Tatemono — Chūō: a working floor with trees in it, and a shop by the desks

Concept

A developer that keeps the models where people work

Tokyo Tatemono has been building in Tokyo since 1896, and the floor it works on now is arranged around two things that most offices keep somewhere else. The first is planting — not pots at the ends of desks but trees at full height, standing through the working floor and carried on into the glass meeting rooms, which the company describes as making the space soft and warm.

The second is the models. A developer produces scale models of everything it builds, and they usually end up in a showroom or a store. Here they sit out on the floor, white and precise, at the scale where you can see the street. Between the two sits the group community room, which contains a small convenience store and a beer server that starts serving at five.

01 · The floor

Trees, at full height

Greenery is set through the working floor rather than around it, tall enough to read as trees rather than planting, with a timber ceiling above.

02 · The meeting rooms

Glass, with the planting continued

The meeting rooms are glazed to the floor, and the greenery is carried into them — in one of them as a printed botanical wall behind the table.

03 · The group community room

A shop, and a step to sit on

The community room holds the in-office convenience store and the beer server, with long tables and bench seating; beside it, a stepped platform finished in grass is used as somewhere to sit at a different height.

04 · The models

The projects, at 1:200

Architectural models of the company’s buildings are kept out on the floor rather than in a showroom.

05 · Brillia Lounge

The ground floor, for the people who buy

The lounge on the ground floor is used for contracts and handovers and for events for the people who live in the company’s buildings.