Founded in 2004 by Dafydd Stuttard, a leading expert in web security, PortSwigger makes Burp Suite, the tool that web security professionals reach for first, trusted by organisations across the world. What started as a passion project quietly became an industry standard. And as the team grew to match the ambition, so did the need for a workplace that could keep up.
With a move into a purpose-built building at Booth Park in Knutsford on the horizon, Daf came to us with a question we love: how do we make a bigger space feel as good as the one we're leaving behind?
Getting to Know You
Before we put a single line on paper, we do our homework. We spent time with the PortSwigger teams in their existing space — running collaborative workshops, listening, watching and asking lots of questions. Not just about the work itself, but about the rhythms and rituals that make their days feel good. The stuff people don't always think to mention until you ask.
And it was the watching that proved most revealing.
Discovering Workstyles
Their current building was large and sprawling, and teams had naturally drifted into smaller rooms, arranging themselves around the edges of the space with their backs to the centre. On the face of it, this looked like an accident of awkward rooms and limited options. But the more time we spent with them, the more we understood, this wasn't a quirk. It was wisdom. Engineers had instinctively created something that worked beautifully: focused, heads-down concentration around the perimeter, and a natural zone for collaboration in the middle when they needed it. The only problem was the walls between rooms, which left teams feeling cut off from each other.
This matters more than it might sound. Research shows that active communication within teams can boost productivity by as much as 25% and yet the layout of a building can silently undermine it, not through any bad intention, but simply through the way walls and corridors funnel people away from each other.
Our challenge became clear- how do you bottle that natural arrangement, scale it up, and make it work across a large open-plan building, without the walls?
A Pattern Language
For inspiration, we turned to nature. Cellular structures, the way living things organise themselves into clusters that are both self-contained and connected, gave us the framework we were looking for. We designed a modular system of semi-enclosed team nodes, each sized for eight to ten people, that preserved the perimeter-focus, centre-collaboration pattern the teams had organically developed.
Each node gives a team enough of its own identity to feel like home, while remaining open and connected to the spaces around it. Tea points sit naturally between clusters, not an afterthought, but a considered part of the design, creating the kind of informal collision points where ideas tend to surface when nobody's looking for them. Distinct colour palettes help people navigate the floor intuitively.
That modularity matters enormously for a company moving at speed. PortSwigger's new space is designed to grow comfortably to well over two hundred people without needing to be rethought from scratch, the kind of decision that pays for itself. Research shows that almost half of office workers say the room where they were interviewed would influence their decision to accept a job offer. In the tech sector, where competition for talented engineers is as fierce as anywhere, that's not a soft consideration, it's a strategic one.
Human Nature
Something else kept coming up in our workshops, independently and unprompted, across every team we spoke with: a real desire to feel connected to the natural world during the working day. And there's solid science behind it. A global study on biophilic design found that natural light in their work environment topped the list of what employees want most. Separate research found that cognitive performance improved in all biophilic conditions compared to baseline. For a team of engineers in deep concentration, these aren't incidental details, they're fundemental.
Booth Park has greenery in abundance, but proximity to nature and connection to nature aren't quite the same thing. Floor-to-ceiling glazing puts the treeline right in the eyeline of desk and breakout spaces. Ground floor doors open to terraced areas. Planting comes inside to blur the boundary between building and landscape. The result is a space that breathes.
The Impact
The building was designed to house up to 400 staf, a statement of intent from a team of around 50 at the time. Since moving into Booth Park, that ambition has been more than justified. $112 million in private equity investment, a King's Award for Enterprise, and new offices in London and Atlanta followed.
What makes the workspace story compelling is how central it has become to the culture that drives all of it. While most of the tech sector defaulted to hybrid, PortSwigger went the other way, committing to in-person working as the foundation of their best thinking. Every Friday, the whole company gathers in the Knutsford atrium for an all-hands meeting, live-streamed to London and Atlanta. The space we designed isn't just where people work. It's where the company comes together.
PortSwigger looked like a world-class company long before the rest of the world caught up.
"One of the reasons we chose Sheila Bird Studio was because of how they looked to get deep under the skin of Portswigger and understand how we work. Their process is highly collaborative, engaging and shaped around our needs as a business. I am confident we have a flexible and innovative design solution that will help us in our next phase of growth"
Dafydd Stuttard
Managing Director, Portswigger
