Michelin, Ambassador Office Building

There are offices where brand identity is applied like wallpaper logos here, corporate colours there, and a mascot near the entrance. And then there are offices where the identity runs all the way through, where you can feel the brand in the geometry of the furniture, the texture of the ceiling, the way the light falls.

Michelin's Warsaw headquarters at the Ambassador Office Building, designed by Colliers Define, belongs firmly to the second category. The project received a prestigious distinction at the World Design Awards in the Corporate Design Concept category, recognition for a space that earns the Michelin name not by displaying it, but by embodying it.

The tyre as a design language

The brief for Colliers Define architects Zuzanna Jaszczuk, Magdalena Kubicka, Zuzanna Świątek and Jakub Jaworek was to create a space that reflects the character of one of the world's most recognisable brands while remaining genuinely human to work in. The answer was to draw from the brand's visual DNA without quoting it literally.

The circular form of the tyre becomes the spatial grammar of the entire 1,800 m² interior. Rounded edges appear in the reception desk, in the soft lines of the furniture, in the acoustic panels of conference rooms whose curved surfaces quietly echo tyre tread patterns. The brand's signature navy and blue appear as accents throughout in floor finishes, ceiling details, and furniture trim, never dominant, always present. Bibendum, Michelin's century-old mascot, also makes his appearance, but as a considered graphic gesture rather than a novelty.

Alpha Round: the open space as a constellation

The open-plan working area is where the lighting concept reaches its fullest expression and where flexxica's Alpha Round pendants take centre stage.

The floor plan of the building is itself curved, and the designers responded to this with an unusual workstation layout: triangular desks, arranged in clusters, that follow the building's arc rather than fighting it. The result is an open space that feels organised without feeling regimented, generous without feeling empty. Large gaps between workstations give each person genuine room to consciously prioritise comfort and breathing space over density.

Against this backdrop, the Alpha Round pendants do something essential. Each workstation receives its own pendant, positioned directly above, bringing light down to a personal scale. What could easily become visually chaotic, dozens of individual lamps suspended across a large open floor, instead reads as rhythm. The circular forms hover in loose constellations, their soft, even downlight creating islands of warmth within the broader space. Individual lighting at each workstation creates an intimate atmosphere, introducing a more domestic character that breaks the conventional office aesthetic.

The Alpha Round is not an accent lamp or a statement piece. It is a working luminaire, precise, reliable, acoustically thoughtful in its construction, but its form speaks a language that the rest of this interior understands fluently. The circle, at Michelin, is never incidental.

Swings, greenery, and the space between desks

The open space also includes swings, inviting a brief moment of rest during breaks. It is a detail that reveals the project's underlying ambition: not just to make the office functional, but to make it somewhere people choose to be. A large co-working zone connected to the kitchen provides a space for relaxation and collaboration, supporting relationship-building among employees. 

Greenery is woven throughout, in potted, framed, and mounted forms, contributing to an atmosphere that sits somewhere between a well-designed workplace and a considered living space. This is the homely office tendency taken seriously: not as styling, but as a genuine position on what work environments owe to the people inside them.

An award-winning interior and a replicable idea

The World Design Awards recognition reflects something that is harder to quantify than the space's technical specifications: the project demonstrates what it looks like when a brand brief is treated as a creative opportunity rather than a constraint, and when lighting is designed as architecture rather than infrastructure.

flexxica's contribution, both through the catalogue Alpha Round and through the custom bespoke pendants, shows the range of what integrated lighting design can achieve. The Alpha Round brings warmth and domestic scale to a large working floor. The custom pieces make brand identity visible in the one element of an interior that every occupant experiences constantly, all day, without necessarily noticing: the light above their heads.