Office Redesign? Why Calgary Tech Companies Are Choosing Murals Over Art Prints

Walk into most corporate offices in Calgary and the walls tell you nothing. Mass-produced prints in identical frames, hung at regulation intervals, chosen not for meaning but for inoffensiveness. They communicate precisely one thing: nobody thought about this space. In an era where companies compete fiercely for talent, where workplace culture is a recruitment tool and employee retention depends partly on whether people actually want to be in the building, that silence is a missed opportunity.

Calgary's technology sector has been the first to recognise this. Across the city's innovation corridor, from the East Village tech hubs to the repurposed industrial spaces of Inglewood and Ramsay, a quiet shift is underway. Companies are stripping generic art off their walls and commissioning murals instead. Not decorative afterthoughts, but intentional, site-specific works that encode company values into the architecture itself.

The Problem with Generic Office Art

The framed print exists in a curious liminal space: present enough to fill a wall, absent enough to say nothing. It is the visual equivalent of hold music. And while that neutrality might have served the anonymous corporate offices of the early 2000s, it actively undermines the objectives of contemporary workplace design.

Modern offices are designed around intentionality. Every element, from acoustic panelling to furniture configuration, serves a purpose. Yet art is often the last consideration, delegated to whoever has the office supply catalogue open. The result is a disconnect: a workspace meticulously planned to foster collaboration and creativity, decorated with imagery that could belong to any company in any city.

For Calgary tech companies in particular, this disconnect carries real weight. These are organisations that build their employer brand on innovation, on doing things differently. A wall of stock photography undermines that narrative before a candidate even reaches the interview room.

Why Murals Work for Tech Culture

A mural is not decoration. It is architecture by other means. Where a print occupies a wall, a mural transforms it. The distinction matters because it shifts the relationship between the artwork and the space from cosmetic to structural. The mural becomes part of the building's identity, inseparable from the experience of being in it.

For tech companies, this structural quality aligns with how they think about everything else. A well-commissioned office mural operates on multiple levels simultaneously. It communicates brand values without the heavy-handedness of a mission statement plaque. It creates landmark spaces within open-plan environments, giving teams a sense of place. It generates organic social media content when employees photograph their workspace. And it signals to visitors and prospective hires that this is a company that invests in its environment with the same care it invests in its product.

The best office murals in Calgary draw on the specificity of their context. They reference the prairie landscape, the geological formations of the foothills, the city's particular quality of light. This grounding in place is especially powerful for tech companies, whose work often exists entirely in the digital realm. The mural becomes the physical anchor, the reminder that this team builds from a specific place with a specific identity.

The Role of Murals in Recruitment and Retention

Calgary's tech hiring market is competitive. Companies are not just competing with each other but with remote opportunities from Toronto, Vancouver, and the United States. In this context, the physical workspace becomes a differentiator. It has to offer something that a home office cannot.

Murals contribute to this calculus in ways that are both tangible and intangible. A striking entryway mural creates a first impression that no amount of ergonomic furniture can match. Common-area murals become gathering points, the informal landmarks around which office culture crystallises. Conference room installations provide visual texture to video calls, subtly communicating brand identity to external partners and clients.

Several Calgary tech firms have reported that their office murals appear unprompted in employee social media posts, in recruitment material photography, and in candidate feedback about office tours. The mural becomes a proxy for culture: if a company cares enough to commission original art, the reasoning goes, it probably cares about the other things too.

Commissioning an Office Mural in Calgary

The process of commissioning a mural for a corporate environment differs from public art in several important ways. The brief is typically more complex, balancing brand guidelines with artistic integrity, navigating corporate approval structures while preserving the spontaneity that makes a mural compelling. The installation timeline must accommodate business operations. And the finished work needs to function in a space that people occupy for eight or more hours a day, which demands a different sensibility than a piece designed for passing foot traffic.

At KINN Studios, we approach office mural commissions as an exercise in spatial narrative. We begin with the architecture: the sight lines, the light conditions, the flow of movement through the space. We then layer in the cultural brief, the values and stories that the organisation wants embedded in its environment. The result is work that feels inevitable, as though the space had always been waiting for precisely this image.

The scale of our installations ranges from single feature walls to multi-room narratives that unfold as you move through a building. For tech companies, we have found that the most successful projects are those that treat the entire office as a canvas, creating a cohesive visual language rather than isolated moments of beauty.

Beyond the Walls: Murals as Brand Infrastructure

There is a broader argument here about the role of physical environments in brand building. In a city like Calgary, where the tech sector is still defining its identity relative to the dominant energy industry, the aesthetic choices companies make carry outsized significance. A commissioned mural is a statement of permanence and ambition. It says: we are building something here. We intend to stay.

This is particularly relevant as Calgary's downtown undergoes its ongoing transformation. Former office towers are being reimagined, new mixed-use developments are rising, and the innovation economy is carving out physical territory in neighbourhoods that a decade ago were purely residential or industrial. Murals serve as cultural markers in this transition, signalling the arrival of creative industries and the values they bring with them.

For companies considering an office redesign, the question is no longer whether to include original art but how to integrate it from the earliest design stages. The most powerful results come from projects where the mural artist is engaged alongside the architect and interior designer, not summoned after the furniture is in place.

Making the Case Internally

For facilities managers and office culture leads tasked with making the case for a mural investment, the argument has both qualitative and quantitative dimensions. On the qualitative side, there is the improvement to workplace experience, the strengthening of brand identity, and the recruitment advantage. On the quantitative side, a mural is a fixed asset with a lifespan measured in decades, requiring minimal maintenance compared to rotating art collections that demand ongoing curation, insurance, and handling.

The comparison with art prints is instructive. A collection of framed prints for a mid-sized office represents a recurring expense: acquisition, framing, installation, eventual replacement when tastes or branding shifts. A mural is a single investment that appreciates in cultural value over time, becoming part of the company's story.

Calgary's tech companies are leading this shift because they understand something fundamental about space and identity: the environment you build is the culture you get. A mural is not the whole answer, but it is a powerful beginning. If you are considering a project like this, we would love to hear about it.