• Client: Adyen
• Location: Amsterdam
• Solution: Standard whiteboard walls combined with one custom-built curved panel
• Products: Curve Wall and Sharp Wall (standard), plus a bespoke curved panel
• Finish: Satin Stone (SatinTones ceramic steel colour)
• Application: Meeting rooms, collaboration areas and open office spaces

Adding a whiteboard wall to a single meeting room is a contained decision, but Adyen needed writing surfaces across several different spaces in one office, from enclosed rooms to open-plan areas people walk through daily. Specified separately, room by room, that kind of multi-space brief easily ends up as several disconnected purchases rather than one coherent installation, with mismatched shapes, colours or mounting details giving away that each wall was chosen independently.

One panel, custom-built rather than taken from the standard range, wraps from the ceiling down into the wall in a single continuous curve, rather than stopping at a straight edge. That kind of shape only works if it is planned into the wall build-up from the start, since a standard rectangular panel could not follow the same line.

A panel that curves continuously from ceiling to wall rather than stopping at a straight edge changes what the wall behind it needs to do. The substrate, any services routed through that section, and the transition to the surrounding ceiling finish all have to be planned around the curve itself, since a panel this shape cannot simply be mounted onto a wall that was built for a flat, rectangular board. Coordinating that kind of junction is part of what separates a genuinely integrated whiteboard wall from one that has clearly been added after the fact.

Away from the one bespoke curved panel, the rest of the office used Chameleon’s standard product range: Curve Wall’s rounded profile in spaces where a softer line suited the interior, and Sharp Wall’s straight edges where a more conventional panel fit better. Both are off-the-shelf shapes, not custom-built, which kept the majority of the installation straightforward even with one genuinely bespoke piece elsewhere in the office.

What actually connects Curve Wall and Sharp Wall across Adyen’s office is not the shape but the finish: a single low-gloss Satin Stone colour applied consistently no matter which panel a given room needed. That is a specification detail easy to overlook next to the more visually obvious choice of shape, but it is the one doing most of the work in making a multi-room, multi-shape installation read as one decision rather than several unrelated purchases.

Several of the panels sit directly on an open-plan floor between glass-walled meeting rooms, rather than tucked inside a single enclosed space. That positioning puts the writing surface somewhere people pass on the way between desks and meetings, which only works if the panel is genuinely part of the walkway’s architecture rather than something that has to be walked around.

Treating the whiteboard walls as one project rather than a series of separate purchases produced results beyond the installation itself. Teams gained noticeably more writable space than a handful of individual boards would have provided, spread across the rooms and open areas where it was actually needed. Collaboration got easier, since a group no longer had to find or wait for one shared board when a writing surface was already built into wherever they were working. The single Satin Stone finish gave every space a consistent design language despite the different room types and panel shapes. And wall sections that would otherwise have stayed blank became genuinely useful, doing double duty as both a writing surface and a considered part of the interior.

Adyen’s teams work with an Agile method drawn from their own ICT sector, and the whiteboard walls are part of that daily practice rather than a fixed backdrop. Panels get written on, erased and reused as work moves through a room. A wall that only looked good would not have held up to that, and a wall that only performed would not have fit the office’s considered interior; this project needed both.

A wall filled with sprint boards or planning notes one week and cleared for a different purpose the next is common in Agile teams that treat the writing surface as shared working memory rather than an occasional presentation aid. A whiteboard wall specified for that role has to survive far more erasing and rewriting over its lifetime than one used mainly for occasional meetings, which is where the underlying ceramic steel surface, not just the finish applied on top of it, ends up mattering most.

Where an office needs writing surfaces in several distinct areas, standardising the finish while varying the shape per room is a workable way to keep the result coherent without forcing every space into an identical panel. It is worth deciding the finish once, centrally, rather than letting it drift between rooms.

Discuss your project with our specialists, or visit our whiteboard wall page to see the full range of shapes and finishes, including Curve Wall and Sharp Wall.