Brown Brothers Harriman, New York
One arm platform, from the trading floor to the hot desk
Client: Brown Brothers Harriman
Design and fitout: Innovant
Location: 140 Broadway, New York, USA
The project
Brown Brothers Harriman is one of the oldest private banks in the United States. They spent close to a decade working on Innovant benching at their Manhattan office. When the space was due for renewal, the firm chose to retrofit rather than replace: Innovant reworked the existing desks into flexible sit-to-stand workstations, holding down both cost and environmental impact while giving the floor a fresh, current feel.
On each renewed desk sits an Atdec AWMS-2-D13 in black, carrying dual monitors on two independent arms. The finish, footprint, and ergonomic adjustability were chosen to read as part of the desk rather than as hardware bolted onto it.
The brief behind the hardware
Finance floors have particular demands and character. Desks run long hours; they are shared, reconfigured, and re-set to a new person's height and eye line several times a week; and the environment is design-led and often client-facing, so the mounting hardware has to look considered, not industrial.
Two requirements were central to specification. The arms had to move quickly and hold position through constant adjustment, because an arm that drifts or needs re-tensioning is an arm that gets fought with daily. In short they needed to be truly high performance. And they had to pair correctly with the new sit-to-stand desks; when a worksurface travels through its full height range, the screens need to accommodate that movement and adjust to the right viewing angle without a second thought from the user.
Why AWMS-2-D13
The weight capacity of 8kg or 17.6lb per-arm is a working rating, not a ceiling to be approached with caution. The arm is engineered to carry its rated load and stay fully adjustable at the top of that range, which matters on a floor where nobody has time to nurse their equipment.
The black finish disappears against dark screens and desk frame, complementing the wider office aesthetic. Construction in high quality materials supports repeated, high-frequency adjustment in a shared-desk setting, backed by a 10-year warranty that fits the long service life the retrofit was designed to extend.
A wider consideration: one range across the whole floor
This is where the Brown Brothers Harriman desks connect to something larger. Atdec is a leading choice for the most demanding seats in finance: trading and dealing desks where a single operator sits behind four, six, or eight-plus screens on custom assemblies built from Atdec's modular range. High screen density, precise sightlines, and hardware that holds rock-steady under a wall of monitors are the everyday brief on those desks, and it is the brief Atdec is built around.
The operational and back-office desks that make up most of a finance floor, the one and two-monitor workstations like pictured, are usually specified separately, and often from a different maker. Specifying them from the same range as the trading desks is the more sensible path, for three reasons.
The first is aesthetic consistency. A floor reads as one environment when the mounting hardware shares a design language from the dealing desk to the shared operational bench; mixing brands and finishes breaks that line.
The second is a single performance standard. The movement, the hold, the load behaviour, and the feel under the hand are the same everywhere, so ergonomic quality does not drop off the moment you step away from the trading desk. Everyone on the floor works on hardware built to the same brief.
The third is the modular system itself. Because the range is component-based, facilities and procurement teams work with one family of parts across desk types. There's fewer variants to hold, a shorter list to reorder, and the ability to reconfigure a desk from single to dual, or adapt a bench as a team grows, without introducing a new supplier. From the trading desk to the hot desk, it is one platform.
Result
Brown Brothers Harriman kept its existing desks in service, added genuine sit-to-stand flexibility, and finished each workstation with a monitor arm that carries its load, moves cleanly through daily readjustment, and sits quietly inside Innovant's design. The same range that anchors high-density trading desks scales down to the everyday desk without a change in look or feel, which is the practical argument for standardising a floor on one mounting platform.
AWMS-2-D13 at a glance
- Dual dynamic arms on a short post, one monitor per arm
- Capacity: each arm to 8kg or 17.6lb
- Display size: to 38-inch, curved or flat
- Movement: three dimensions, plus tilt, pan, and landscape-to-portrait rotation
- Height range: 368mm or 14.5-inch, suited to sit-to-stand
- Mount: F-clamp, short post for low, clear sightlines
- Finish: black (also silver and white)
- Warranty: 10 years
