Studio Alexander Fehre Turns a €300 Million Roche Lab Complex into a Science-Inspired Interior World

When a pharmaceutical giant spends €300 million on a single building to consolidate 1,000 researchers under one roof, the interior design faces a peculiar challenge: how do you make a space feel human when the program is dominated by precision instruments, automated sample transport, and vibration-sensitive concrete? Studio Alexander Fehre answered that question at the Roche Diagnostic Innovation Center in Penzberg, Bavaria, with a design strategy that treats the science itself as a source of visual identity. The material palette, the color accents, even the floor graphics are drawn directly from laboratory culture: pipettes, reagents, microscopy imagery.

The result is an 11,400 m² interior (within a 35,500 m² complex whose architectural envelope was developed by Nickl & Partner) that manages to feel cohesive across seven levels of radically different program. Concrete-framed laboratories sit next to one of the region's largest wood-hybrid office wings. An automated sample transport system that reduces development cycles by 30 percent is left deliberately exposed rather than hidden behind panels. A sky lounge on the top floor opens onto Alpine panoramas. The building consolidates 60 percent of the Penzberg site's diagnostics R&D workforce, overcoming decades of fragmentation, and the interior is the thread that stitches all of it into a single legible place.

The Atrium as Connective Spine

The central atrium is the building's organizing gesture: a light-flooded vertical void flanked by timber-clad balconies, white cylindrical columns, and connecting bridges that act as communicative interfaces between the laboratory block and the office wing. The decision to use timber cladding on the balustrades, in contrast to the polished white floor and structural columns, gives the space a warmth that tempers its considerable scale. You read the section instantly: seven levels, each visible, each populated.

The bridges are not afterthoughts. They are the social mechanism of the building, positioned to force encounters between researchers moving between lab and desk. Greenery lines each level, softening the edges without becoming decorative noise. The atrium functions as a vertical street, and its proportions are generous enough to avoid the canyon effect that plagues many comparable research complexes.

Laboratory Zones: Precision Without Sterility

The laboratory interiors are built on concrete for a pragmatic reason: vibration protection for instruments sensitive enough that a footstep could corrupt a reading. That structural constraint could have produced oppressive rooms. Instead, the labs read as crisp and organized, with exposed services ceilings, white benches, and a color-coding system derived from actual laboratory consumables. The pale blue lockers with orange handles in the corridor zones are not arbitrary; they belong to a wayfinding language that extends through every level.

One of the most provocative decisions is the choice to keep the automated sample transport system visible. In most facilities of this caliber, automation is buried behind walls. Here, the moving infrastructure becomes part of the spatial experience, a reminder that the building is not just a container for science but an active participant in it. The "Cube," a fully automated central storage system for biological samples, is integrated into the building core, anchoring the lab program conceptually and physically.

A Color Language Borrowed from the Bench

The microscopy-inspired floor graphic that runs through all levels is the interior's signature move. Viewed from above, the circular and organic patterns in pastel tones create zones of identity on each floor without resorting to conventional signage. The palette, pinks, greens, soft blues, is explicitly derived from the reagents and consumables used in the laboratories. It is a conceptual choice that could have gone very wrong, but Fehre calibrates the saturation carefully. The colors function as orientation devices, not theme-park novelty.

At the detail level, the terrazzo flooring and pastel side tables in the lounge areas maintain the color story at a scale you can touch. There is a consistency here that suggests a thorough material specification rather than a mood board. Every surface participates.

Workplace as Living Room

The office floors deploy a typology that has become standard in progressive workplaces: open desking interspersed with acoustic booths, soft-furnished breakout zones, and planted dividers. What distinguishes the Roche interior from the dozens of tech-office lookalikes is the level of custom fabrication. The curved green banquette seating, the terrazzo-topped tables, the cylindrical planters are all bespoke, designed to sustain the building's continuous spatial language rather than assembled from a furniture catalog.

The blue acoustic booths provide phone-call privacy without walling off the floor plate. Curtained seating areas offer a softer intermediate step between open desk and enclosed room. For a building that houses 1,000 people, the variety of work postures is notable: standing at high counters, sitting at desks, lounging in banquettes, perching on stools. The wood-hybrid structure of the office wing is legible overhead in the timber ceiling slats and battened wall surfaces, lending a tactile counterpoint to the high-tech program below.

Social Spaces and the Alpine View

The top-floor café and sky lounge exploit the site's position between Munich and the Alps. Floor-to-ceiling glazing frames a panorama of snow-covered evergreens, and the curved green banquettes are oriented to privilege the view. The winter images reveal a building that sits comfortably in its Bavarian landscape: the foggy treeline becomes the primary artwork.

The breakroom kitchens, with their long green islands and white cabinetry, continue the residential register that Fehre applies to the communal zones. These are not corporate cafeterias. They read as shared domestic spaces, scaled up. The recessed lighting and curved lounge seating reinforce a sense of repose that stands in deliberate contrast to the laboratory rigor downstairs.

Collaboration Infrastructure

The building offers a dense network of collaborative spaces positioned along the office floors: high-top counters with blue stools, fabric privacy screens, glass-walled conference rooms, and long tables with yellow planters acting as informal dividers. The glazed interior partitions allow visual connection across open floors, keeping the section legible even from a seated position. Yellow accents in the seating and planters mark these zones, distinguishing them from the green-dominant lounge areas.

The fully glazed meeting rooms resist the temptation to become opaque boxes. They sit within the floor plate as transparent volumes, ensuring that even formal meetings are visually connected to the open workspace. For a research organization whose innovation depends on cross-disciplinary exchange, these are not amenities. They are instruments.

Custom Details and Material Consistency

The custom-made furniture, kitchens, wall installations, and two distinctive seating staircases speak to a level of control that goes well beyond specifying off-the-shelf products. The curved service counter with fluted paneling and ribbed timber ceiling is a piece of furniture-scale architecture: it mediates between the structural grid and the human body. The curved timber-battened wall in the staff lounge creates acoustic warmth while reinforcing the wood-hybrid identity of the office wing.

Planted partition cabinets and exposed timber ceiling slats in the daylit lounge areas bring the material story down to an intimate register. These moments matter because the building is enormous, and without them the continuous spatial language would risk becoming monotonous. The detailing prevents that, introducing rhythm and variation within a disciplined vocabulary.

Facade and Exterior Context

The exterior, designed by Nickl & Partner, presents a horizontally banded composition of alternating copper and dark panels. It is restrained, almost civic in its proportions. The glazed facade of the office wing reveals the stacked levels with pale timber ceilings and white staircases, making the interior legible from outside. The planted balconies with their oversized fiddle-leaf figs are visible through the glass, blurring the boundary between architecture and interior.

The building's CO2-free operation and 70 percent reduction in energy requirements compared to previous laboratory generations are embedded in the envelope and systems rather than expressed formally. It is a performance-driven sustainability strategy, not a decorative one, which is appropriate for a diagnostics company that trades in measurable outcomes.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan reveals the organizational logic: office wings arranged around a central planted courtyard with scattered trees, confirming the atrium's role as the building's social and spatial anchor. The courtyard brings daylight deep into the plan and provides a visual reference point from every floor. The plan's symmetry is not rigid; the wings flex to accommodate the distinct structural requirements of lab (concrete) and office (wood-hybrid), and the courtyard absorbs the difference.

Why This Project Matters

Corporate research facilities are often designed to impress visitors and then forgotten by the people who actually work in them. The Roche Diagnostic Innovation Center inverts that priority. Studio Alexander Fehre's interior takes a building whose program is dominated by automation, vibration control, and biological sample storage and produces an environment that feels genuinely inhabitable. The decision to derive the color and graphic language from the science itself is not a gimmick; it gives the interior a specificity that generic biophilic-office formulas cannot match.

The project also demonstrates what happens when interior design is treated as a strategic instrument rather than a decorative afterthought. By consolidating 60 percent of the site's R&D workforce and providing a continuous spatial language across lab, office, and social zones, the interior does real organizational work. It removes the friction of fragmentation. For a company whose competitive advantage depends on accelerating diagnostic development, that is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.

Roche Diagnostic Innovation Center Interior by Studio Alexander Fehre (interior design) and Nickl & Partner (architectural envelope), located in Penzberg, Bavaria, Germany. Total area: 35,500 m² (interior scope: 11,400 m²). Completed in 2026. Photography by Philip Kottlorz.

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