Corporate Office Interiors: The Ten Decisions That Set the Budget

An office fit-out is the fastest project most companies will ever commission and the one they are least prepared for. A building takes years and everyone expects it to. A fit-out takes months, which creates the impression that the decisions are small.

They are not small. They are simply taken very early, often before anyone realises they are being taken, and once taken they set the cost of everything that follows.

Here are the ten.

1. Density

The single largest cost driver, and it is decided before the first drawing. Seats per thousand square feet determines HVAC load, electrical load, toilet provision, exit width, lift waiting time and the amount of everything else.

A higher density is cheaper per seat and more expensive per square foot, and it has a ceiling set by the base building's services capacity, not by how many desks fit on a plan.

2. The base-build condition

What are you actually taking on? A warm shell with services brought to the floor is a different project from a bare shell. Check specifically: is the HVAC capacity at the floor adequate for your density, is there a fire sprinkler and detection layout in place, what is the electrical load available, is there a raised floor or will there be, what is the slab-to-slab height.

Every one of these that is absent becomes your cost. Many are discovered after the lease is signed.

3. Ceiling height, and what has to fit above it

Slab-to-slab minus structure, minus ductwork, minus sprinkler and detection, minus lighting, minus cable containment, equals your finished ceiling height.

If the answer is uncomfortable, something has to give, and the options are all expensive: exposed services, reduced HVAC, or a coordination exercise to get everything into a shallower zone. Establish this in the first week, because it changes the entire character of the interior.

4. Open plan versus cellular

Not a taste question, a cost question. Cellular offices multiply partitions, doors, ironmongery, lighting circuits, HVAC zones, sprinkler heads and detectors. Each cellular room is a small independent set of services.

The honest version of this decision is a number: how many enclosed rooms, agreed in principle, before planning starts. Adding them later is where fit-out budgets go.

5. Meeting room ratio

Almost always underestimated, and the correction is always late and always expensive. Decide the ratio of meeting seats to desk seats early, agree the mix of sizes, and plan the acoustic and AV provision for them from the start. AV and acoustics retrofitted into a room already built cost several times what they cost designed in.

6. Services strategy

Are you working with the base building's central HVAC, or supplementing it? Where do the electrical distribution and the UPS sit? How does data reach the desk, floor boxes, poles, or a raised floor?

The raised floor question is the one to settle first. It affects finished floor level, door heights, ramp requirements at thresholds and the entire services distribution logic. It cannot be revisited later.

7. Acoustic performance

The most common complaint in a completed office and the least commonly specified item in the brief. It is set by decisions in the ceiling, the partitions, the floor finish, the HVAC noise level and whether partitions run to the slab or stop at the ceiling.

Partitions that stop at the ceiling are cheaper and they are the reason nobody can hold a confidential conversation. Decide which rooms need slab-to-slab and accept the cost in those rooms.

8. The specification of what you touch

A rational way to spend: high specification on the surfaces people touch and see daily, door ironmongery, task seating, work surfaces, the reception, the meeting rooms, and standard specification everywhere else.

An office where the door handles feel cheap reads as cheap regardless of what was spent elsewhere. An office with a plain corridor and an excellent boardroom does not.

9. What happens to the base building's compliance

A fit-out alters the sprinkler layout, the detection layout, the exit routes and the occupancy load. All four have compliance consequences and all four require the building's fire consultant and the local authority to be engaged, not merely informed.

This is the item most likely to delay occupation, because it is the item most likely to have been treated as a formality.

10. Programme, and whether it is honest

A fit-out runs on a lease clock. Rent is usually being paid from a date that does not care whether the design is resolved.

The compression always lands on the same place: the design and procurement stage, because it is the only stage that looks compressible. It is not. Long-lead items, joinery, seating, glass partitions, specialist lighting, AV, have real lead times, and a programme that has not accounted for them is a programme that will be met by substituting whatever is available.

The pattern

Nine of these ten are settled before a drawing is issued. They are settled in a room where the discussion is about headcount, lease terms and a move-in date, and where nobody thinks of themselves as making design decisions.

That is exactly what they are doing. The value of having a designer in that room is not the drawings. It is that someone present knows which of those sentences has a number attached to it.