Remove a suspended ceiling out of a commercial floor and you gain height, daylight and a view of the ductwork. The question is what you do about the last of those, and the answer on this floor is that there are three different ceilings rather than one.
The client proposes their own design solution
Opening up the ceiling was not a designer's flourish imposed on a client. At the first meeting Foresight said the open industrial ceiling over the kitchen area was acceptable, and suggested that a solution would be to paint it in a dark colour to minimise the visual impact.
Three ceilings, by zone
Over the kitchen, dining and breakout area, the ceiling is open and everything within is painted a single dark tone: ducts, trays, sprinkler pipework and steel all disappear into the same colour, so the eye stops reading them as separate objects but sees the space above as depth. In the quieter zones the original ceiling was retained and left light as a room for focused work does not need to be dramatic. Over the general workspace the plane is broken by coloured baffles, and running through all of them, in the specification for every zone, are the columns and the ceiling coffers. These are the ceiling elements common to the whole plate, which is unites three different treatments together as one floor.
Painting out is cheap. Doing it well is not
The cost of a dark ceiling is a tin of paint. The price of a quality paint is that every trade above the line has to finish to a standard not anticipated when the drawings depicted the ceiling as open. Hangers get aligned. Trays get set out. Labels and bright fixings get resolved rather than hidden. That coordination is the whole job, and it is invisible when it goes right.
Bringing the height back where it matters
Above the island, the counter and the long tables, a raft of timber battens drops down without closing off the ceiling. You can still see through to the dark soffit beyond so the height is diminished but the raft provides the table underneath a lid. People sitting at a long bench in a tall room feel exposed, and a raft remedies that without building a room around them.
The lighting sits in the raft rather than dropping from the soffit above, so the drops are short and the raft reads as one piece. Where the raft stops the lighting also changes character, which indicates subtly the move from the table into general circulation.
An open ceiling is an important services consideration
Before it is an aesthetic decision, an open ceiling is a smoke, sprinkler and ventilation decision, agreed with the building rather than drawn in isolation. On this floor one meeting room changed use for that precise reason. It is a useful thing to know at concept stage instead of on site.
Value maximised
Above locations where people stop, rafts are beneficial, over a corridor they are decorative. The discipline is in leaving them out everywhere else.
