Nestlé France decided to set up new headquarters for more than 2,000 people on a 14-hectare property it owned, the former Menier chocolate factories in Noisiel. Built between 1860 and 1908 around a mill on the Marne River, these buildings were the epicenter of a company town complete with homes, shops and a school.To protect the site’s architectural history (the mill designed by Jules Saulnier is an historical monument), the Nestlé France property teams set about completely revamping the buildings with the help of Reichen & Robert architects. In all, 43,000 square meters of industrial facilities were to be turned into office space and 20,000 square meters added.

The signage had to be contemporary yet fit with the site’s existing architecture and create a system for routing traffic between buildings that were not originally intended as office space. All of this had to be in keeping with the signage style of Nestlé office buildings worldwide.

Each building was given a name associated either with the site’s history or a widely-known architectural principle. These included “Patios”, “Colonnade”, “Atrium”, “Mill”, “Nave”, “Confection”, and “Arcade”. Further celebrating the site’s architecture, the buildings were all assigned a distinctive architectural “logotype”. The buildings are divided by a central road, such that the “Marne” side could be color coded with blue and the “Park” side with green. Users now find their way thanks to orientation tables, signs posted along the central road, directional signs mounted on ultra-fine steel posts that follow one another like pages of a book but have red circles to clearly resemble signs, as finally door plates.