How Do You Design an Office for Families Discussing Multi-Generational Wealth?

Around the oldest person who will be in the room - and that single decision resolves almost every other question, because the settings that serve the eldest generation serve all three, while the settings that serve the youngest exclude one. Notice who most family-office rooms are actually built for: the middle generation. The person who booked the meeting, sends the emails, is roughly the same age as the advisor, and never mentions that the room is dim or that the chair is hard to get out of, because for them it is not. Meanwhile the eldest person at the table, frequently the one whose money it is, is quietly having a worse meeting than everybody else and will not say so.

So set the room by them. Light first, and more of it than you think, but none of it as glare - reading a printed page comfortably at seventy takes substantially more light than at forty, and most meeting rooms are lit for atmosphere rather than for reading. The answer is not brighter downlights, which put glare on a polished table and hard shadows under everybody's eyes; it is more light from lower down and from more than one direction, plus a matt table surface rather than a gloss one. If somebody has to angle a page to read it, the room has failed and nobody will mention it. Seats second: a deep soft chair is hard to stand up from, and the moment somebody needs a hand to get out of a chair in front of their own family is a moment you built into the room, so firmer, higher and with arms - which is also better for anybody sitting for two hours. Sound third: no background music at all, because speech and music occupy the same range and music is the commonest source of difficulty for anybody with reduced hearing.

Pace fourth, which is not architecture but belongs on the same list: paperwork explained once, slowly, to everybody rather than passed down the table. And then the youngest generation, whose needs are real and trivially added - a power socket within reach, a screen that works first time, somewhere to put a laptop. That is the whole asymmetry: you can add a socket to a room designed for the eldest, and you cannot add readable light and a firm chair to a room designed for the youngest without rebuilding it. Fragrance stays out of the meeting room - trading and dealing floors are never scented, and closed one-to-one meeting rooms are never scented - and in the lounge it runs low, because a multi-generational group is the group most likely to contain somebody sensitive to it and least likely to say so, with a SOSA Vaayu at ₹11,999 or a Mountain Breeze reed at ₹849 and fragrance-free seating named. Fragrance is an ambience decision like lighting or seating: it makes no contribution to a client's decisions, judgement, risk appetite or emotional state, and I make no claim that it does. It works alongside ventilation, cleaning and housekeeping, never instead of them, and the client's preference overrides any plan. Made in India, and a portion of every order supports girl-child education through Nanhi Kali.