When Schwabe approached us about redesigning their Portland headquarters at PACWEST, the conversation could have gone the way a lot of law firm renovation conversations go. Refresh the finishes, reconfigure some conference rooms and modernize the palette. Instead, it became something more interesting and more demanding.
What they were really asking for was alignment. Their previous environment no longer reflected how the firm actually works, how it wants to be experienced or where it’s headed. Beyond cosmetic, the challenge was organizational, cultural and spatial all at once. That distinction, between an office that looks updated and one that genuinely functions differently, is where the most meaningful workplace design lives. And it’s what shaped every decision we made across Schwabe’s three connected floors.
The first thing we had to understand was how legal work actually happens at Schwabe. Not in the abstract, but in the day-to-day. That meant listening closely and having conversations with leadership, and most importantly, with the people who spend their days in these spaces.
What we heard from employees during our visioning process was less about wanting the trendiest workplace features and more about fundamentals, like access to daylight and spaces that support genuine connection. Essentially, an environment that actually reflects the culture of the firm.
Three connected floors present an obvious risk: you end up with three separate offices that happen to share an elevator bank. People stay on their floor, habits solidify and the sense of firm-wide community erodes. The internal stair connecting floors 17, 18 and 19 was our answer to that problem. By creating an open vertical core with visibility across levels, we gave people a reason to move through the building rather than just through their day. The stair draws energy upward toward the 18th-floor lounge, which sits adjacent to the landing as a natural gathering point.
In that sense, the stair is less about getting from floor to floor and more about making interaction feel effortless. You can’t program spontaneity, but you can design conditions that make it more likely to happen.
In traditional law firm design, access to natural light tends to correlate with seniority. Corner offices with views go to partners, and the interior spaces go to everyone else. It’s one of those conventions that persists not because it serves the organization well, but because it’s always been that way.
During the planning process, the conversation was never about “who gets daylight,” but “how do we make daylight work for everyone?” That’s a meaningful reframe, and one that treats the building’s assets as belonging to the whole organization rather than being allocated by hierarchies. The resulting floor plan prioritizes daylight access throughout, not as a perk but as a baseline.
Legal work requires a high degree of focus, confidentiality and acoustic privacy, and that reality shaped the planning from the start. At Schwabe, acoustic privacy between offices was treated as a genuine design priority, not an afterthought. Related practice groups were reorganized to improve adjacency, and the floor plan creates clear zones for focused work without sacrificing the collaborative energy that connects the firm. The result is an office that doesn’t force people to choose between getting work done and feeling connected to their colleagues. Both are supported by the space, which is ultimately the job of workplace design.
The speakeasy bar at Schwabe could easily be read as a trend-driven amenity. The kind of thing that shows up in a project description to signal that a firm is contemporary and culture-forward, but that’s not how it came to be, and that’s not what it does. It came out of listening.
Employees told us that the culture of camaraderie within the firm was something they valued and wanted to protect. Informal spaces that support genuine connection were meaningful to them. A speakeasy bar, with its sense of discovery and intimacy, creates a social context that a standard break room simply cannot. It’s a place where a mentorship conversation can happen naturally, where a team can mark a hard-won case and where the relationships that hold a firm together are maintained over time.
The material language of this project, wood, stone, textured fabrics and earthy tones balanced with vibrant accents, expresses where this firm is rooted and what it values. Schwabe has a long-standing commitment to downtown Portland and to this building, and the design reflects that sense of place.
A sustainability thread is also woven throughout, with FSC-certified wood, Fair Trade-certified furnishings, and approximately 80 linear feet of casework salvaged and repurposed from Schwabe’s previous office, alongside low-VOC finishes, recycled content and biophilic elements.
The honest takeaway from Schwabe is something worth carrying into any workplace project: the value of specificity. Rather than starting with a model of how offices are supposed to work in 2026 and fitting a firm into it, the design began with this firm, these people and this culture, and built outward from there.
When a space can hold confidentiality and openness, tradition and evolution, focused work and spontaneous connection, all at once, it becomes something more than functional. It becomes a place people want to be. And in a world where that’s genuinely optional, earning someone’s presence is the whole challenge.
Editor’s Note: Bethanne Mikkelsen, NCIDQ, LEED AP is the Office/Retail/Community Studio Leader at Ankrom Moisan.
