Jing Studio Layers Oak, Bronze and Pale Metal Surfaces into a Quiet Investment Office at Kerry Plaza

Corporate interiors in commercial towers tend to fail in one of two ways: they over-brand themselves with feature walls and logo moments, or they surrender to the default grid of ceiling tiles and system furniture. Jing Studio's 2017 fit-out for Zhanbo Investment, a 760 m² floor inside Kerry Plaza, avoids both. The brief asked for an office that was open, transparent, minimalist and cohesive. The studio answered it almost entirely through surfaces and the way they stack in depth.

What makes the project worth a closer look is how much work a small material palette does here. The photographs show oak veneer, a bronze-toned volume, pale metal panels, black partitions and striped carpet. There is little else. Each finish marks a different spatial layer, so you read the office as a sequence of planes rather than a collection of rooms. For an investment firm, whose clients judge seriousness at a glance, that restraint reads as a deliberate statement.

Oak as the Warm Constant

Oak shows up at two very different scales: as veneer panels lining the conference room edge and as the long meeting table at the center of the boardroom. Repeating one timber across wall and furniture is a simple move, but it ties the meeting spaces into one material family. The table looks less like a purchased object and more like part of the room's construction.

The warmth matters because the rest of the palette is cool. Without the oak, the black chairs and metal surfaces would push the office toward a trading-floor sterility. With it, the meeting rooms feel like places to sit for an hour rather than a five-minute pitch.

A Freestanding Core in Bronze

The most legible spatial device is the bronze-toned freestanding core beside the conference corridor. It stands as an object in the plan instead of being buried inside walls, so circulation can wrap around it. This is how the design gets its layering: you see the oak plane behind, the bronze volume in front, and the carpet stripes pulling your eye along the route.

Set that next to the pale metal wall in the work area and a clear logic appears. Metallic finishes mark the vertical elements that organize movement, while timber marks the places where people settle. It is a quiet coding system, and it works without any signage.

Work Bays Under Linear Light

The open workspace uses black partitioned desk bays set against a pale metal panel wall, with a ceiling of parallel linear light strips running overhead. The contrast is sharp on purpose. The dark desks sit low and heavy, and the pale wall and striped ceiling recede, so the room reads as a bright volume holding a dense layer of work.

The linear lighting earns its place. Parallel strips give the ceiling direction and echo the striped carpet below, so the floor and the soffit seem to belong to one drawing. It is a modest detail, yet it does more for cohesion than any single feature wall could.

The Boardroom and the Skyline

The boardroom shows the office's priorities most clearly. A long oak table with a recessed central trough, which keeps cables and clutter out of sight, runs toward a floor-to-ceiling window that opens onto a hazy skyline. The trough is the kind of detail that only matters in use, and its inclusion suggests the designers thought about the table as a working surface first.

Directing the room's long axis at the glass is the project's one theatrical gesture, and it is borrowed rather than built. The city does the decorating. For a firm that wants to signal reach and composure, that view is a better asset than any added finish.

Why This Project Matters

Interior projects of this size rarely get serious attention because they seem to offer so little: no structure, no facade, a fixed floor plate. Zhanbo Investment shows that the constraint can be productive. When the envelope is given, the designer's tools come down to material, sequence and light, and Jing Studio uses all three with discipline. The layering of oak, bronze, metal and black gives the office depth without walls.

For practitioners, the lesson is about editing. Every finish here has a job, and none is duplicated for decoration. You can borrow the method directly: assign materials to spatial roles, repeat them at more than one scale, and let lighting and flooring reinforce the same lines. The result is a workplace that feels designed as a whole rather than furnished piece by piece.

Zhanbo Investment Interior Design by Jing Studio. Location: Kerry Plaza. Area: 760 m². Year: 2017. Photography: Zhang Chao.

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