Original art for a corporate HQ, law or finance fit-out: serious in reception, quiet on camera, on the wall before move-in

This page is for the person responsible for the art on a corporate fit-out: the workplace designer, the fit-out or project lead, or the office manager or facilities lead at a headquarters, a law firm, a bank, an asset manager or a professional-services firm. The programme is usually 10 to 60 pieces across a reception, a boardroom, a run of client meeting rooms, partners' or executives' offices and the corridors between them, and it has a move-in date that was fixed before anyone thought about the art.

You are trying to get three things done at once: a reception that says the firm is established, meeting and boardroom walls that stay quiet behind a camera, and a floor that reads as one scheme rather than a collection of purchases. Consultants who work with corporate clients describe the same cast of decision-makers on that one decision: facilities managers, corporate real-estate teams, architects and commercial interior designers ³.

Not you? A landlord dressing a multi-tenant lobby should read Commercial landlords; a firm that wants to rotate rather than own, Art rental and leasing companies; a consultant running the programme for the client, Art consultants.

The first thing that goes wrong is that office art arrives looking like decoration: a bright print, a motivational canvas, a stock abstract that could hang in any hotel corridor. A law or finance reception needs work restrained enough to sit under the firm's name and serious enough to be asked about. Office-art suppliers themselves recommend statement pieces in reception and abstract work in conference rooms that starts a conversation without distracting from one ².

What we do about it starts with the catalogue's own profile for this room. Of the 224 works tagged Meeting & Boardroom, 112 are tagged Peaceful, 101 Calming and 87 Moody; only 26 are tagged Bold. The leading theme is Geometric (79) and the leading style is Abstract (66), followed by Textured & Plaster (52). That is the reverse of the catalogue's hospitality rooms, where floral and bold work leads. For the quietest briefs there are two smaller sub-selections: Contemporary Minimalist (27 in Meeting & Boardroom) and Wabi-Sabi (21), both built on muted greys, beiges and off-whites.

Every one of these is an original painted for your order, not a print, and any of them can be repainted in a palette pulled from your scheme: the carpet, the joinery veneer, the firm's secondary brand colour. Send the references and we match to them, then show you each canvas in progress photographs before it ships.

The boardroom wall that faces the camera is the most-seen wall in the building, and the wrong piece dominates every call: high contrast, saturated colour or a busy composition pulls the eye from the person speaking and reads badly through video compression. The second problem is the set: six meeting rooms furnished with six unrelated purchases look like six purchases.

What we do:

• Low-contrast palettes for the camera wall. Start from the Meeting & Boardroom works whose leading colours are grey, or from Textured & Plaster pieces whose interest is in relief rather than colour. A relief surface reads as texture in the room and as a calm field on screen.
• One design, varied per room. The Vary route builds a series off one catalogue work, so the boardroom and the meeting rooms share a composition and a palette without repeating the same canvas. Each room's piece is a different original in the same family.
• A quieter register for the boardroom than for reception. Specify the boardroom set in one muted palette and let reception carry the colour; both come from the same order and the same painters.
• A finish that stays out of the frame. Frameless stretched canvas, or a black or wood frame, sits flat against the wall and adds no reflective surface to the camera's view.

If the wall is wider than it is tall, say so: most catalogue works are vertical, and a boardroom piece is usually painted wider than its listed size, at the width the wall needs, with the composition adjusted by the painter rather than stretched.

The third problem is scale in both directions. Reception wants one large piece that holds a double-height or a long wall behind the desk; corridors and lift lobbies want a dozen or two dozen related verticals that fit between doors. Suppliers that sell from stock can do one or the other: a stock catalogue rarely holds a 2.5-metre piece in the right palette, and buying twenty corridor pieces one at a time produces twenty unrelated ones.

Because nothing is stocked, we paint at the wall's size. Vertical and horizontal works in the catalogue list sizes up to 203 × 153 cm (80 × 60 in), panoramic works up to 127 × 254 cm (50 × 100 in) and square works up to 183 × 183 cm (72 × 72 in); larger pieces and two-metre-plus formats are painted on request, with the proportions adjusted by the painter rather than stretched. For reception, 176 works tagged Lobby & Reception are Abstract in style and 95 are panoramic; these are the usual starting points for the wall behind the desk.

For corridors the catalogue is unusually deep: 435 of the 447 works tagged Corridor & Circulation are vertical, and 80 of those are Geometric. A corridor run is normally briefed as a Vary series from two or three source works, so each floor reads as related without repeating, and every piece is a signed original rather than one image printed twenty times.

The fourth problem is provenance. A law or finance firm will not put anonymous wall art in a client-facing room, and a partner will ask, sooner or later, who painted it and what it is made of. Most trade suppliers answer with a brand name.

Our answer is the same on every page of this site. iHomeArt is the trade channel of Siji Art Hub in Foshan, Guangdong. The painters train inside the hub's exhibition programme, which has run more than 50 exhibitions with professors of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts among the exhibitors, and the hub's collection exceeds 11,000 works. Every piece is hand-painted on canvas, signed by the artist and shipped with a certificate of authenticity, and you receive progress photographs or video of your own canvases as they are painted. That is the whole materials claim: original paint on canvas, by a signing artist, with a certificate that identifies the work. Works by the hub's senior partnered artists are kept as painted and carry provenance, exhibition history, a photograph with the artist and invitations to their shows; see Custom & commission and Master works.

What we do not claim, so that you do not write it into a specification: no fire, flame-spread, acoustic or environmental certifications; no stock and no prints; and, because the work is hand-painted, each piece in a series differs slightly from the approved sample, which is the point of buying originals.

The fifth problem is the programme. Move-in dates do not move, art is usually the last package released, and a supplier quoting from a stock warehouse is quoting from a different starting point than one who paints to order. Office-art suppliers quote production windows from a few days to several weeks depending on scale ²; ours is stated per order and committed in writing.

1. Brief. You send a schedule or a list of walls with widths, reference codes if you have chosen them, palette references, finish per position, the delivery address and the date the walls will be ready.
2. Quote, within 1 business day. The quote carries a lead time for the whole order and a proforma invoice for your purchasing team. There is no public price list; volume pricing applies from 10 pieces.
3. Painting, about 1 week. Progress photographs or video at each stage; we continue only once you have approved the stage, so colour is corrected on the easel, not on site.
4. Sign, certify, finish. Rolled, frameless stretched, or framed in gold, silver, black, white or wood; framed pieces ship boxed with hanging hooks.
5. Transit, 3 to 7 days. Free, insured and tracked, by DHL, FedEx or USPS, to the site, the contractor or a consignee in another country if you tell us at order stage.

Door to door is about 10 to 13 days for a standard piece. A programme of 25 to 60 pieces is scheduled as one project with its date confirmed at quotation; if the building has a loading-dock booking system or a restricted delivery window, tell us at order stage: the tracking number is sent on dispatch so the dock slot can be booked against it, and where the dock is the problem we deliver to the contractor’s store or another consignee instead.

The quote is only as accurate as the brief, and corporate orders arrive in two forms.

With a designer or a schedule. Send the art schedule or a plain list: position, wall width and height, ceiling height, what sits below the wall (desk, credenza, banquette), orientation, finish, quantity and the reference codes you have chosen. Add palette references photographed in daylight for anything to be recoloured: carpet, veneer, paint codes, the brand's secondary colours. Each catalogue record already lists style, theme, colours, orientation and the sizes previously produced, so a line on your schedule and a line in our quote can be the same line.

Without a designer. Send a photograph of each wall with its width, tell us which room it is and what you want it to feel like, and we come back with proposals: works from the catalogue tagged for that room, at a size worked out from the width, in the palette you point at. A reception wall, a boardroom and four meeting rooms is a normal first email. Your director then sees the progress photographs before anything ships, and payment runs against the proforma invoice through accounts payable.

In either case include the move-in date and the delivery address. If a sample is wanted first, the minimum order is one piece, so a sample is simply a one-piece order at the size you intend to use.

The catalogue's 14 room tags are views, not partitions: every work carries three to five of them, so the counts below overlap. For a corporate fit-out, five rooms do most of the work.

Read the profiles as a brief. Meeting & Boardroom is calm and geometric; Workspace & Office, the open-plan floor, is where the catalogue's bold and uplifting work sits; Lobby & Reception holds the large-format abstracts. Where a slice is thin we say so: Meeting & Boardroom lists only 20 panoramic and 19 horizontal works, so a wide boardroom wall is usually a vertical or square design painted wider, and Cityscape works tagged Workspace & Office number 16. The tiles below open the live catalogue pages; every count is computed from the catalogue at build, so it cannot go stale.

Commercial interior design and architecture practices. If you specify but the client's procurement team or the contractor raises the order, specify by our reference code, agreed size, colourway and finish; each catalogue record carries style, theme, colours, orientation and the sizes produced, which is what a schedule line needs to survive value engineering. Whoever sends the codes is quoted within 1 business day, the practice can receive the progress photographs while the contractor holds the order, and each piece's certificate of authenticity goes into the handover file. Delivery to a site under construction or to the contractor's store is arranged at order stage.

Coworking and flexible-workspace brands. The brief is the reverse of the boardroom: energy, brand colour and a house look that repeats in every city. Operators use art to make shared floors read as high-end environments that attract and retain tenants and members ⁴. Start from Workspace & Office, where 128 works are tagged Bold and 83 Uplifting; recolour four or five designs to the brand palette, order them frameless stretched, and repeat the same codes for the next site. Nothing is discontinued because nothing is stocked, and each site's batch runs on the same 10-to-13-day cycle, with volume pricing from 10 pieces.

Workplace and facilities teams buying direct. A facilities trade title has put art procurement to its readers as a facilities-management question ¹. If that is you, use the wall-photograph route above: photographs and widths in, proposals out, director approval on progress photographs, a proforma invoice to accounts payable, and pieces that arrive framed and ready to hang.

Corporate gifts, events and dated commissions. A single commission for a client milestone, a gala or a launch runs through the Commission route on Custom & commission: painted from a photograph or a brand reference with sketch approval first, framed with its certificate, and shipped free and insured to the recipient or venue, in another country if needed. Commissions are quoted individually with a lead time in writing, so send the date with the enquiry.