Office Interiors — Questions Answered

Take the net usable area, deduct core and circulation of roughly 18–25%, allocate 25–35% for meeting, collaboration and support space, and divide the remainder by the workstation footprint including its circulation — typically 42–55 sq ft per desk. Our seating capacity calculator does this against your dimensions.

1,400 x 700 mm for a comfortable primary desk, 1,200 x 600 mm where density matters, and 1,050 mm for touchdown or hot-desk positions. Below 1,200 mm a desk cannot carry a monitor, a laptop and a notebook simultaneously, which is the actual test rather than the drawing.

1,200 mm between the backs of facing chairs as a minimum, and 1,500 mm on a main circulation route. Below 1,100 mm, people seated back to back have to move for anyone passing, which is the most common cause of complaints about a plan that looked fine on paper.

Only with attendance data. A sharing ratio of 0.7 to 0.8 desks per person is realistic for genuinely hybrid teams and 1.0 remains right for roles that attend daily. Implementing sharing without measuring actual attendance produces either wasted space or a Tuesday morning where a third of staff have nowhere to sit.

In 2026: five to six rooms for four to six people, two to three larger rooms, one boardroom and seven to nine single phone booths per 100 staff. The booth number has roughly tripled since pre-hybrid norms because so many meetings now have a remote participant. See our meeting room design guide.

Allow 1.8–2.3 sq m per seated person with 900 mm of circulation behind every chair. That gives 3.6 x 3.0 m for six people and 4.8 x 3.3 m for eight. Rooms sized to the table rather than to the people are nominally larger and used at two-thirds of their rated capacity.

Most organisations use theirs for eight to twelve hours a month and still want it, because it carries the client-facing function. The question worth asking is whether it can be designed to divide, or to double as a town-hall and training space, which is a ₹3–₹8 lakh decision at fit-out and impossible afterwards.

Usually because the partition stops at the false ceiling and sound travels over it through the ceiling void. Slab-to-slab construction costs ₹80–₹180 per running foot more and is the fix. The other candidates are an unsealed door, a single-glazed front, and cross-talk through shared HVAC ducting.

300–500 lux at the desk for screen-based work, 500–750 lux where paper documents are read, 300–400 in circulation and 500 in meeting rooms with 300–500 lux vertical on faces for video calls. Uniformity and glare control matter as much as the absolute level.

Absorption, blocking and masking together. An NRC 0.85+ ceiling first, then desk screens and carpet, then slab-to-slab partitions on enclosed rooms, then sound masking at 42–48 dBA where the floor holds more than about 40 open-plan seats. Full detail in our office acoustics guide.

Size for the occupied density and the equipment load, not the floor area — a dense floor with dual monitors per desk carries a materially higher internal gain than the base-build design assumed. Fresh air at 8–10 litres per second per person is the comfort figure; less and the afternoon slump is a ventilation problem.

Four power and two data as a working standard, delivered at desk level rather than from a floor box under it. Add a dedicated circuit for any print or server position, and plan the routing before the flooring goes down — retrofitting desk power into a completed floor is disproportionately expensive.

₹1.4–₹4.5 lakh per seat in 2026, covering fit-out and furniture, depending on density, specification and base-build condition. At 80 sq ft per person and ₹3,000 per sq ft that is ₹2.4 lakh per seat; at 65 sq ft and ₹2,200 it is ₹1.43 lakh.

Refurbishing an occupied floor typically costs 60–75% of a new fit-out of the same area, but takes 30–60% longer and carries a productivity cost that rarely appears in the comparison. Relocation adds the new fit-out plus reinstatement of the old premises at ₹250–₹700 per sq ft. Model both with the reinstatement included.

Plan for a soft refresh at five to seven years and a substantial reconfiguration at eight to twelve. What extends it is flexibility built in at the start: demountable partitions, a modular power and data grid, and furniture that can be reconfigured without a carpenter.

Often, and it is worth assessing before it is written off. Task chairs with functioning mechanisms can be re-upholstered at a fraction of replacement cost, and workstation frames can usually take new tops and screens. What rarely transfers well is storage sized to a different plan.