Raw, Earthy, and Open: How Unfold Designed UrbanWrk's Kolkata Workspace
Unfold designed UrbanWrk's managed workspace in Kolkata as an integrated design-build project, taking a 96,000 sq. ft. across multiple floors from concept through handover. Here is how the space came together.
Designed by Unfold - UrbanWrk, Technopolis, Kolkata
The Plan: Open, Readable, Uncluttered
Across 96,000 sq. ft., Unfold organized the floors around one principle: every zone should be visible, accessible, and connected to natural light. Lounge areas, meeting rooms, collaborative zones, personal desks, and private offices each occupy a distinct area. A dark metal grid framework runs across the ceiling and defines these zones without walls or partitions, keeping the floor visually open while giving each area a clear boundary. The floor reads as one connected space, and circulation across it requires no effort to navigate.
Unfold pushed the communal zones and meeting rooms to the building's edges, where daylight is strongest, and the city's low skyline is most present. The interior zones serve focused, individual work. The periphery serves gathering. The lounge area anchors the center of the floor with a green upholstered sofa, integrated shelving, and seating configurations that accommodate both quick conversations and longer informal sessions. Across the full floor plate, the space breathes in a way that managed workspaces of this scale rarely do.
Materials and Palette
Designed by Unfold - UrbanWrk at Technopolis Kolkata
Birch plywood and gray SPC flooring run across the entire floor plate, creating a warm but neutral base that holds the space together without competing with it. Against this backdrop, fabric-based artworks mounted on metal rod frames introduce texture and personality without disrupting the open plan. The frames allow the works to be dual-sided, positioned near the banquet seating and along the lounge perimeter to create zone definition while keeping sightlines open. The palette gives the space its warmth and consistency, while the view, the tree wells, and the custom meeting table give it its character.
The Central Seater
The spatial anchor of the lounge is built around two live tree wells. Rather than treating the trees as decorative additions, Unfold designed the seating arrangement around their presence, which gives the gathering zone a rootedness that furniture alone cannot produce.
Adjacent to the tree wells, banquet seating is arranged in a semi-circular layout with a dark olive green channeled upholstery finish. The seating breaks into individual booth configurations separated by columns, each sized for small group work or informal meetings. Fabric motif artworks mounted on metal rod frames sit between the booths, adding visual interest without closing off the space. Warm cove lighting runs along the top of the banquet, defining the zone from above without introducing a hard ceiling. Dual-sided fabric panels connect the seating upward, adding vertical definition without closing off sightlines across the floor.
The Custom Meeting Table
Unfold designed the meeting table as a single-looped fluid surface rather than a standard conference setup. The form offers three seating configurations within one continuous piece: window benches along the perimeter for informal work, meeting desk modules within the loop for structured sessions, and informal edge seating for smaller groups.
Designed by Unfold - UrbanWrk at Technopolis Kolkata
The table sits at the end of the lounge area, where it connects the more casual banquet seating to the working zones beyond. One piece of furniture accommodates multiple modes of use without requiring reconfiguration or additional pieces, which makes it well suited to the range of tenants a managed workspace at this scale typically serves.
Designed, Built, and Delivered by Unfold
UrbanWrk Kolkata is a managed workspace that Unfold took from brief to handover as a single integrated project. Architecture, interiors, and execution were handled by one team, and the finished floor reflects that.
For workspace projects of this scale and complexity, the quality of coordination is as important as the quality of design. Unfold manages both under one process, from the first brief to the final handover.