Fit-out inside a live building is a logistics problem before it is an interiors job. The bank did not decant. Nine hundred people kept working while we rebuilt eleven floors above, below and around them.
The constraint that set everything else
One goods lift. Shared with building operations, available to us from 19:00 to 05:00. Every sheet of plasterboard, every joinery kit and every skip of strip-out waste passed through that single bottleneck.
So we designed the programme backwards from lift capacity. Materials arrived palletized to floor-sized kits, labelled by room, in the exact sequence they would be installed — because there was no room on site to sort anything and no time to look for it.
Trading floors are not offices
A trading floor has power, cooling and acoustic requirements closer to a small data hall than to an open-plan office. Two hundred and twenty positions, each with dual-feed power and enough cooling to run six screens without turning the room into a sauna.
The critical path ran through the electrical riser, not the finishes. We cut over one riser per weekend, with a tested rollback plan each time, because a Monday morning with no power on a trading floor is a headline rather than a snag.
Millimetres, offsite
Executive joinery was manufactured offsite to ±1.5 mm and installed as kits. That tolerance sounds like vanity until you try to land a 12-metre veneered wall against a raised floor and a suspended ceiling that were both built by someone else, years earlier, to a different set of assumptions.
We laser-scanned each floor before joinery release. Three floors came back out of tolerance against the original as-builts; catching that on a screen cost nothing, catching it on site would have cost a fortnight per floor.
Soft landing
We kept a small team on the floors for two weeks after practical completion, during the staff move-back. They closed 340 minor items that would otherwise have become a defects list arriving by email over six months.