The Shard

A full refit of the seventh floor at The Shard for REM, with planting specified alongside the architectural designer rather than added at the end. We installed the scheme and our horticulturists have maintained it ever since.

A virtual tour of the floor is here.

Two light problems in one floor

Level 7 has the windows the building is famous for, so most of the floor has more light than a London office ever normally gets. Plants that would sulk anywhere else can be used properly here, and the scheme leans into that.

The entrance seating area has the opposite problem. It sits away from the glass and gets very little natural light, which is exactly where most office schemes quietly fail — a specimen goes in looking magnificent, then stretches and thins over a few months while nobody can say quite when it started.

So that planting is sustained by grow lighting. Not a lamp pointed at a plant, but lighting specified as part of the scheme, at an intensity a plant actually reads as daylight. It is the difference between planting that survives a reception and planting that keeps looking like the day it went in.

Zoning without walls

The rest of the floor is open plan, and planting does the work partitions would otherwise do — marking where one area ends and another begins without closing anything off or blocking the view that people came up seventy floors for.

And we still look after it

One of our horticulturists visits every two weeks — watering to the plant rather than to a rota, feeding through the growing season, pruning, cleaning leaves and checking for pests. On a floor with this much glass and this much heat gain, that matters more than most.

More on how that works on our plant maintenance page.

Credits

Client: REM
Planting: Plant Drop
Plant consultant: Dom Butler