In The Fight For Office Tenants, This Developer Has Delved Into Your Brain

The London office market is caught in a strange land.

Low vacancy rates can mean huge rents are available, but demand is patchy and big deals remain hard to come by. 

So one of the capital’s biggest office developers is looking to tap into the minds of potential tenants by using the principles of behavioural psychology in the design of a new £750M skyscraper. 

British Land and GIC picked Danish architecture firm 3XN to design the exterior and internal communal areas of the 750K SF 2 Finsbury Avenue, part of their Broadgate campus in the City of London. 

GXN, a division of 3XN focusing on innovation, has taken the principles of the big five personality traits used in psychology — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism — and applied them to the design of the development’s communal spaces.

The goal is to meet the basic needs of individuals among the building’s tenants.

“[The personality types] were used on the basis that everyone at different times, sometimes just throughout the day but certainly over months and years, have different emotional needs and have different psychological wishes as well,” GXN partner and Head of Operations Susan Carruth said. 

British Land Head of Campuses Mike Wiseman said the company wanted to move away from including expensive-to-run amenities that tenants don’t want and toward communal space that can provide a range of uses and create that hard-to-define but much-sought-after quality: a vibe. 

“We're really focused on providing spaces that are actually usable,” Wiseman said. “And so being able to work for a broad range of people is critically important because that will make sure they're used.”

In April 2024, hedge fund Citadel agreed to lease at least 250K SF of 2 Finsbury Avenue, with the option of leasing up to 375K SF. The £98 per SF the firm is paying was at the time a record rent for the City, although since then a lack of Grade A space means rents of £150 per SF have been reached in smaller deals on upper floors at Mitsubishi Estates and Stanhope’s 8 Bishopsgate Tower. 

Abu Dhabi investment firm Modon bought a 50% share in the building in January 2025, with BL and GIC retaining 25% each. 

Rents in the City are rising, but that does not make it an easy leasing market. A total of 1.9M SF was leased in central London in Q3, Savills reported, 30% down on the previous quarter and 28% down on the long-term Q3 average. 

That was partly due to lack of supply, Savills said, but it also pointed to a factor Wiseman highlighted, a lack of transactions over 50K SF. 

Deals are hard to come by but hugely lucrative, and to snag them, BL and GIC are thinking carefully about how best to design internal communal spaces. Creating places where people can work outside of the confines of their own office reduces the need for companies to have their own breakout space, Wiseman said.

The buzz appeals to the human resources director. Not having to pay for as much private communal space keeps the finance director happy. 

BL and GIC wanted the entrance to 2 Finsbury Avenue to become a “social lobby,” Wiseman said, and GXN got down to designing how that might work in practice. 

The area needs to be easy to navigate rather than intimidating, the pair said. The lobby is raised up one floor, and when people come up the escalators, a reception desk will be directly ahead of them and clearly visible — gone is the deskless reception where people might not know where to go. Gone also will be abstract furniture that isn’t clearly actually intended to be sat on. 

The lobby will feature elevated areas where those working will be on view — that’s for when tenants are feeling extroverted and open.

“It’s a place to see and be seen and creates almost a sense of being an audience, watching people,” Carruth said. 

In a similar vein, the main route from the escalators to the lifts cuts diagonally across the lobby, past the reception desk, with a café off to the side. That creates a high-trafficked area and the opportunity for people to bump into each other. 

At the other end of the scale, there are booths around the edge of the lobby for people feeling introverted but who want to get out of the office. The space behind the escalators has also been turned into a seating area where people can secrete themselves, utilising what is normally dead space. 

Plants and natural materials are part of a biophilic design strategy, as is the inclusion of an indoor garden in the podium between the building’s two towers. This can provide a calming space for those feeling neurotic.

“If you're high in neuroticism, then you have a lot more pressure on mind and body, and you need to find somewhere to escape to,” Carruth said. 

Selling a feeling to potential occupiers is an interesting task, Wiseman said. People know what a gym looks like and does, but the feeling of seclusion or interaction developers are trying to create in a lobby is more difficult to define and display. 

BL and GIC are using virtual reality flythroughs in marketing, he said. This is now screen-based rather than using headsets — at least one person walked into a wall wearing one. Also, wearing headsets made people feel uncomfortable and exposed, the exact opposite of the feeling the team is trying to create. 

When all is said and done, design like this is just a theory, and the ideas conjured up in plans don’t often work out in practice. Going back and observing how people use a space once it is open and iterating where needed is key to making sure a building delivers what is promised. 

Carruth gave an example of a building GXN worked on with a large open atrium and a sweeping staircase. The idea was people would flow toward that. But people bought their morning coffee and croissants at the other end of the building, meaning the staircase wasn’t used as much as expected — nothing is stronger than coffee. 

But 2 Finsbury Avenue’s owners are thinking ahead about how they can make every part of the building work for its eventual users. 

“We don’t want to just throw loads of stuff into a building and see what sticks,” Wiseman said. “We want what's going to make sense for people in the building.”