Law firms are usually sober minded and cautious with their architecture. This holds true in Turkey, too, but one project, by the four-year-old studio Salon Architects, carves up that idea into slices. Its interior for a small Istanbul firm, CTHB, achieves some striking effects within a generic modern office building.

“We tried to create a dialogue between linear and non-­linear, similar to the dialogue between the rigid rules of law and the varied perspectives of the lawyers,” explains principal Alper Derinboğaz, who studied architecture at UCLA. His partner, Melike Altinişik, spent six years working in the office of Zaha Hadid, whose influence shows here.

Within the 250-square-metre floor plan, which incorporates two private and two shared offices, the architects applied a decorative layer – a raised PVC flooring system by Alper, and plasterboard walls with aluminum skirting by Knauf – to the corridor that cuts through the interior. The motif of irregular triangles and parallelograms veers from the walls to form furniture: the reception area at the front features an angled desk in black MDF; this melds into a triangular motif on the wall that continues down the corridor. A zigzag of lighting bursts through the ceiling.

The offices are more conventional, yet also slightly skewed, with laminated glass walls tilted at an angle. Walnut veneer MDF clads the backdrops behind the desks, and the triangle motif reappears through patterns in the flooring, as well as on the custom pendant fixtures in powder-coated steel. The overall effect is of energetic movement, somewhat un-lawyerly but still very sharp.