In Praise of Walls: 4 Elements of a Well-Designed Office Space

As coworking spaces rose in popularity over the past decade, you may have found yourself looking at your own office walls with new appreciation.

Whether you’ve struck out on your own or you’re just looking for an office away from home where you can get deep work done, you know that four walls are the minimum requirement for productivity. For too many professionals, private office space has been increasingly difficult to come by, pandemic or no. This is, in part, by design.

As of the first quarter of 2020, up to 70 percent of all office spaces were primarily or partially open plan. While this work isn’t conducive to legal or financial work (or holding confidential conversations), it was a financially advantageous arrangement for landlords and their tenants.

But this movement didn’t put deep work at the center of every day. Open office culture has birthed a generation of workspaces that don’t meet the basic needs of professionals looking for a downtown office space for rent.

Privacy at work shouldn’t be so hard to come by. To help you evaluate the design of your next office space, here are four features that confirm that you’ve found a secure, productive space to work.

1: Solid Walls that Go Deck to Deck

Your office walls should ensure your privacy, as well as security. Afterall, office walls aren’t ornamental – they’re functional. 

When we designed the Firmspace offices, we made sure that the sheetrock panels provide coverage from deck to deck. These panels typically stop just above the drop ceiling that typically hides the pipes and ducts you’d see exposed in archetypal coworking spaces. But this measure has an impact that is worth the additional cost of materials and construction.

By ensuring that the walls fully separate each office, occupants gain the privacy at work that should be a baseline expectation. This helps limit interoffice noise, which is no small matter.

2: Doors that Close and Lock

This element might seem obvious, but if you’re going to build a workspace with four walls that run deck to deck, you also need a door that closes and locks.

Some coworking spaces separate out private workspaces using glass panels – these same materials are used for their doors. These placeholders do separate one person from the next, but they don’t do anything to prevent someone from looking over your shoulder and they make it too easy to see who is at their desk (and who isn’t).

Your schedule is your business, and there’s little point in having symbolic walls in a professional environment. Your private office should come with a significant door made that locks. This access control helps ensure that your workdays aren’t easily interrupted.

3: Sound Masking Systems Promote Focus and Privacy at Work

Studies show that noise impacts human performance and that intermittent noise reduces human performance significantly.

One signs of a space that’s designed for peak performance is a sound masking system. In Firmspaces offices, we use sound masking systems to distribute ambient noise throughout the office space. This noise is precisely calibrated to make human speech less intelligible from a short distance, which, in addition to improving productivity, supports private conversations throughout our offices.

You can spend as much money on noise cancelling headphones as you’d like – they’re no replacement for being in a space that’s built to foster your concentration, where acute silence is replaced with the warm hum of white noise.

4: Quality Surfaces that Send the Right Message

The moment you walk into your downtown office space, you should feel a shift in your energy. If you’re coming off of a quick phone call in the elevator, maybe that will be a sense of calm. If you’ve been listening to a morning news podcast in your car on the commute in, maybe your first steps into the office lobby are energizing.

Your eyes adjust to the new quality of light in the room. You smell the fresh flowers on the counter and the leather chairs in the waiting area. Each surface is more than a visual experience, and that’s why the quality of every element in your workspace makes a difference.

The color and coverings on the walls in shared spaces are as important as the personal touches you add to your personal office. And you need real walls where you can hang any framed credentials or relevant licenses. Your downtown office space should not feel like a temporary stopover because it’s the hub where you conduct your business.

A Well-Designed Office Experience

As commercial real estate agents and public health officials predict the fall of the open plan office, we’re glad to see a renewed enthusiasm for the experience that walls can help facilitate.

Chances are you rented a downtown office space because you were looking for a great experience for yourself and for anyone you’d need to meet there. A well-designed office can help facilitate a great experience, even in the time of social distancing.

The layout of a shared office or coworking space determines how professionals move throughout their day. Today, the floorplan of your office ensures that everyone can navigate the space while maintaining six feet of distance or nudge visitors into a monodirectional path through the space.

If you’re one of the many professionals don’t want to work from home forever, it may be in part because your home isn’t designed to support the kind of focused work you need to do on a daily basis – nevermind the distractions of family obligations, neighborhood noise, and the dishes in the sink.

To find out more about how design supports productivity at our Firmspace locations, reach out to book a tour today.