Well I couldn’t resist, I had to have a go at recreating your photo reference myself:

It was quite challenging, at least the way I did it (going for physical accuracy) because the photo has no doubt been altered a fair bit in post. My floor is still too bright and I only used procedural textures, so with proper texturing it would work a lot better. Here’s how it works:
- I’m using the Physical Sun & Sky as my only real light source.
- I have a Portal Light at each window (rectangular area light with the mental ray portal light shader applied, each area light set to ‘visible’ to make it work). Good info in the help.
- I’m using a ‘linear workflow’ with the photographic lens shader, using it to desaturate the image entirely and crush the blacks a lot.
- I’m using GI and FG. The GI does make it look a bit better, but you might not miss the effect it has until you compare with and without.
By the way, what Andrew said used to be true about FG only adding one bounce, however these days you can turn up the number of diffuse bounces to whatever you like (usually 3 is plenty). You can only use 1 bounce in combination with GI though, otherwise it would be a bit redundant.
I’m using the Mia shader for everything too by the way, with it’s Ambient Occlusion feature enabled to get the really dark corners etc. My scene is modelled roughly to scale also (not that I know the scale, but it’s a few metres wide etc).
One thing I discovered is that turning up the Haze value on the sun & sky system helps reduce the contrast, ie it adds more sky fill light which was useful when trying to reduce the contrast of the floor. I needed to go further though.
On my photographic exposure node I ended up overexposing the scene quite a lot, then darkening my shaders right down in order to keep the really bright ceiling reflections while maintaining a dark scene overall. This is something people often overlook in a more physically accurate lighting scenario (I learned that from Master Zap), if you think how ultra bright the sun is, an object may only be like 2% reflective but that 2% is still really really bright to us when we see it.
Anyway, I’ll clean my scene up a bit and consider posting it but you should keep trying too! 