Design Considerations for your Office

Office space is expensive, it’s a fact. Most companies have to spend a small fortune on renting an office, so it is obvious that you will want to do as much as possible to save space when configuring the layout of your office. Here are a few tips when you are considering the design of your office.

The first thing that you want to do is to think about whether you want an open plan office or not. The advantage to an open office is that there is more room to play with.  This can be great for space saving as; inevitably if you are successful in business you will want to expand in a few years and with an open plan office, the space enables you to change around the layout easily.

You may be wondering, how you can break up the room to create separate areas. There are a wide range of freestanding office screens that are available in a range of finishes, including fabric, wood and acrylic which are all easily movable. Not only this, but the cleverly thought out placing of high storage cabinets or tambour cupboards also help to break up the room.

The next and probably most important consideration for your office is the office furniture and in particular the desks and the configurations. There are various different types of desk systems that are available to you that are all designed to save space.

The first are corner or radial desks that are the most common form of office desking type and you have probably seen them in offices that you have been in. These can be arranged in configurations of four. They are available in left or right hand options and have many different styles.

The next is bench systems. These types of desks have only really become popular in recent years and they are another great way of saving space within the office.  The difference between a bench desk and other forms of office desks is that the desks share the same frame. These desks are usually rectangular however there are bench desks that have wave table tops or corner desktops.

Another option is 120 degree workstations that form “clusters” of desks that usually seat three but different angles of desks seat more. 

Finally you want to think about what type of office storage you want to utilise. Even though we are increasingly relying on the internet and hard drives to store information digitally, there is still the need for office cupboard storage. 

Filing cabinets are the most common form of storage and have been around for more than a century. Compared to some of the more recent forms of storage, they are relatively inefficient, for example a tall 1800mm tambour cupboard is capable of containing 2.5 four drawer filing cabinets worth of space.

Apart from the obvious cupboards another system that is becoming increasingly popular within the office furniture world and that is wall storage. The great thing about wall storage is that is from floor to ceiling which is normally about 2.5 metres high and is up against the wall so therefore saves space.