Feel the Difference
Earlier this year a global lift OEM published the results of one of the most comprehensive analyses of real-world building usage ever conducted. More than a billion lift journeys, tracked across 10 cities in 7 countries over 5 years.
The Times covered it in March. The piece focused on the numbers from London, lift usage up 11% year on year in early 2025, one of the strongest performances across the cities studied. A useful snapshot of how one of the world’s great office markets is evolving.
What one billion journeys actually looks like up close
Scale those numbers down to a single building. In a commercial office with 4 lifts, each lift makes around 10,000 journeys a month. Every journey includes a destination choice. Every destination choice is a button press. On busy floors that adds up to 40,000 to 60,000 presses a year on a single button. Across a building lifecycle, the busiest floors comfortably exceed 800,000 actuations and often pass a million.
Those numbers hold in London, Frankfurt, Rotterdam and every other city in the dataset. The pattern of working may vary. The pattern of pressing buttons does not.
Why durability is the foundation of quality
There is a version of this conversation that is purely technical. Switch ratings. Contact cycles. IP ratings and compliance standards. All of that matters and we are happy to go deep on any of it.
But there is another way to think about it. The people who use those buttons every day; the architect who commutes to the seventh floor, the facilities manager who crosses the lobby a dozen times before lunch, the consultant visiting for an afternoon meeting, none of them are thinking about contact cycles. They are thinking about whether the button works. Whether it feels right. Whether the building they are in feels like a place that has been properly looked after.
That is what premium durability actually means in practice. Not a specification number. A daily experience. Multiplied by every person in the building. Multiplied by every working day across a 20-year lifecycle.
The Dewhurst Compact 3 standard
Dewhurst Compact 3 pushbuttons are engineered and tested to last over 10 million operations. That design standard applies in every market we serve, across every building type, regardless of occupancy patterns or working culture.
What it delivers:
- Consistent, premium actuation feel from the first press to the last
- Reliable, confident feedback on every press
- Fewer replacements and maintenance interventions across the building lifecycle
- A lower total cost of ownership that compounds year on year
- The kind of quiet confidence in a building that people notice when it is absent
https://www.dewhurst-global.com/product-category/pushbuttons/
Source: Andy Silvester, The Times, 12 March 2026 (thetimes.com). Citing KONE analysis of more than one billion lift journeys across ten cities in seven countries over five years. Office market data: Knight Frank. Dewhurst product specifications: Compact 3 and Compact 3P datasheet.