Gensler

With Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep on its client roster, Creative Artists Agency needs a workplace with star power. But that's easier said than done at a spec development in Century City. “There had to be rich materials,” says principal and design director Gene Watanabe, who specified two varieties of white Italian marble for the lobby's focal wall, floor, and dramatic curved staircase. The centerpiece of the eight-story, 240,000-square-foot project is an atrium where a frosted-glass “lantern wall” produces a colored light show, thanks to metal-halide fixtures and dichroic filters. As for the stadium theater, with its gray mohair-upholstered seats, it's unquestionably Oscar-caliber.

PROJECT Theory, New York.

STANDOUT Minimal lines and neutral colors, trademarks of this fashion label, characterize its own headquarters.

PROJECT Disney Store, Pasadena, California.

STANDOUT Playfully modular conference rooms are enclosed either by honeycomb units of rotation-molded plastic or by lightweight foam blocks, which unstack.

PROJECT EC Harris, London.

STANDOUT Airport planning methods define public and private spaces at this international consulting firm.

See images of all the projects in the December 2007 issue of Interior Design. Photo by Benny Chan / Fotoworks.