hen you own posh properties like the World Financial Center in New York and the Bank of America Plaza in Los Angeles, your exhibit can't look like a strip mall. That was the challenge facing Brookfield Office Properties Inc. for the 2011 Recon expo produced by the International Council of Shopping Centers.

To impress the show's retailers, real-estate developers, and investors, Brookfield and its designers, Lorenc+Yoo Design and Journey Communications Inc., felt they should mirror the company's uber-chic New York headquarters.

The result was a 1,200-square-foot space as sleek as an Armani tuxedo. The rear exterior of the exhibit featured a high-gloss black laminate surface topped by a 5-by-30-foot accent strip of ivory laminate. In contrast, the booth's two 25-foot-high sides, with their white laminate rectangles, resembled a fusion of the simple façade of an Apple store and the block-like geometries of a Mondrian painting.

In the entry's reception area stood a giant video wall, consisting of three dozen 46-inch LCD screens stacked in rows of six. While the screens ran video loops highlighting the company's properties, visitors rested in front of them on leather banquettes and ottomans. After lounging, attendees met with staff inside any of three conference rooms behind the media wall. Seating six to 10 people, the meeting spaces offered streamlined elegance, with Eames chairs, linen-covered wall panels, marble tabletops, and LED lighting set inside custom housings.

The sense of sophisticated stability the company wanted to evoke from attendees was the very one it elicited from Exhibit Design Awards judges. As one of them said, "It feels solid, enduring, and rich." e