Blog Courtesy of ATDEC
What a specialist contributes to a landmark workspace
GSK’s new global headquarters on New Oxford Street set out to be one of the world’s healthiest workplaces, and it earned the credentials to match: BREEAM Outstanding, WELL Platinum, and a BCO Innovation Award for evidence-led design. A building at that standard is assembled from specialists, each responsible for getting one element exactly right. Atdec’s element was the monitor arm, supplied across roughly 3,000 desks through partner Rainbow Design.
That scope is a useful illustration of how Atdec sees its place in the commercial furniture channel. Monitor arms are not the headline of a workspace. But in a building designed around how the environment affects stress, cognitive function, and wellbeing, the point where a person meets their screen is not a detail you can afford to get wrong. An arm that sits the display at the correct height and depth, and clears the worksurface beneath it, is doing quiet ergonomic work several hours a day for every one of those 3,000 people. Multiply a small compromise across a workforce that size and it stops being small.
The product chosen was Ora, Atdec’s single-monitor arm engineered for equal capacity and performance with both flat and curved displays. That last point mattered for GSK specifically. Most desks there run a single 34-inch curved monitor, which is steadily replacing the older dual 24 or 27-inch arrangement as the default office setup. Ora was built for exactly that screen, rather than treating a curved display as an exception to manage. Where a desk needs a second screen, a second Ora is added: no different bracket, no reconfiguration, just a clean and consistent approach repeated across the floor.
This is where being based in and serving the commercial channel shapes the product. A specifier working at GSK’s standard is not choosing on price or headline specification; those are assumed. They are choosing on the things a specialist designs in and a generalist overlooks: consistent performance across screen types, a setup that installs cleanly at scale, and a system that can adapt as desks change rather than being torn out and replaced. Atdec designs for the OEM building the desk, the installer deploying hundreds of positions, and the facility manager who has to live with the result for years.
A project like GSK brings that perspective into focus. The building’s reputation rests on the contribution of every supplier on the list, Atdec among many. Getting the monitor arm right will never be the reason a workspace wins an award. But getting it wrong would quietly undermine the ergonomics and productivity the whole design exists to deliver, which is precisely why that piece belongs with a specialist.