Roar, the Dubai-based interior design and architecture studio founded by Pallavi Dean, has completed the office fit-out for a law firm at 300 North LaSalle in Chicago, marking the studio’s first project in North America.
The building itself is a fairly conventional commercial tower, occupied by several other law firms. Dean says the starting point was rational. The team needed to stop multiple floors from feeling like separate offices.
The biggest intervention was structural. The studio carved through the three floorplates and introduced a statement staircase, creating internal circulation that allowed the workplace to behave more like a connected campus. The staircase creates visibility between floors and encourages movement.
Every private office occupies the same floor area, but the similarity stops there. By working with the building’s window bay rhythm rather than against it, the offices vary in shape and orientation depending on their position.
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It was a challenge getting the partners comfortable with offices that are angular or slightly irregular. Law firms are traditionally very cellular and hierarchical. Everyone understands the reassuring certainty of a rectangular office. Dean’s team had to demonstrate that a space could be unconventional without compromising privacy, acoustics, storage or status.
As with every Roar project, Dean began with evidence-based design. Working with a psychologist, the studio developed psychometric profiles and held briefing sessions not only with the steering committee, but with different departments and user groups across the firm. They wanted to understand how people focused, collaborated, made decisions and managed the very different energy levels demanded by legal work.
To be a successful project, the law office needed to balance stimulation with cognitive ease. People need choice and a sense of control over their environment. They need spaces for deep focus, spaces for social connection and places where they can retreat without feeling isolated. That is why the project offers such a wide spectrum of settings, rather than assuming everyone performs best in the same chair, at the same desk, all day.
Chicago DNA
The client’s strongest request was that the office should have a connection to Chicago. The city makes itself felt throughout the space: from the Loop, the rhythm and improvisation of jazz, the river, to Chicago’s identity as a garden within a city.
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These ideas shaped the circulation, planting, materiality and movement through the space without becoming too literal. Colour reinforces the wayfinding logic across all three floors. Each level carries a distinct palette rooted in a specific layer of Chicago’s identity, giving staff and visitors a sense of where they are without a sign in sight.
As a result, the workspace has the gravitas, privacy and discretion the profession demands, but it is also warm, human and occasionally surprising. For Dean, her favourite design moment is the café. It is genuinely an agile working environment rather than a canteen. There is a high bar overlooking the river and that extraordinary Chicago view, alongside lounge seating, booths and individual business-class-style pods where people can work with a greater sense of privacy.
Importantly, the workplace offers variety. Some people thrive with energy and activity around them, while others need a greater sense of enclosure. The café gives people both prospect and refuge: open views across the city, balanced with more protected spaces where they can concentrate. It allows people to choose the setting that suits their task and their nervous system at that particular moment.
