I worked on the Cloudflare London office with a few other colleagues and an external architect firm who were tasked with making it a reality. The proposed drea

I worked on the Cloudflare London office with a few other colleagues and an external architect firm who were tasked with making it a reality. The proposed dream office would not work because: * Teams are not always 3 or 6 and they grow and contract constantly * Unisex bathrooms are fine for guys, not for anyone else * 1 shower is never enough * The airflow and temperature hasn't been thought about * Growth hasn't been thought about Also, in the comments someone suggested a proper stove in the kitchen. Let me dampen that immediately, fire regulations and other rules probably state that you cannot have an open flame or other heating devices outside of a very small selection or well-controlled items. You also probably are not fitting the electrics for this. Unless your company size is very stable (WRT growth), you are going to have an open plan office. It is the only way to deal with "fit more desks here", "change the layout like this", "that team is now growing faster than this team, swap their locations around". Things we focused on: * If we're going to have open plan (urgh), can we make it visually organic and not a battery farm (mis-align things, introduce space, randomness, natural materials, etc) * If we're going to have open spaces, can we control the lighting so that it is flooded with natural light, we have zero strip lights and each area has control of their lighting (big windows, with blinds, dim lights over work areas, desk lighting people can control, LED strips for even lighting over walkways) * To keep it habitable, we pump far more regular air than most places would, and we only aircon a little when it really is outside of a comfortable range * If we're going to have communal spaces can we have them cosy and quiet (read "A Pattern Language", we purchased a lot of old Danish furniture and furnished small spaces like a little living rooms, very comfy) * If we're going to have a town hall space / auditorium, can we limit the noise or impact on the rest of the environment * If we're going to have a shared kitchen, can we make sure people can sit with most of their team (bench tables beat small tables, as the latter constrain you to 6 people and a team may be 7) But it is an office, there is high growth. In the current London space we started with 60 people and now have just shy of 100, and it is the same space and we're not yet sitting on top of each other. That is only achievable by having open plan and not filling in space with desks until you have to, and by moving people around when you need to. The ideal office shown... would be lovely. But to have that, you cannot really have any growth, and I bet the air would stagnate in that space pretty quickly. Things we got wrong: * Not enough of the right sized meeting rooms. We put in 4 x 2 people, 2 x 4 people, 1 x 8 person. Later had to add 2 x 6 people and another 1 x 8 person. * We are starting to feel the noise levels, this really is about how sales grows fastest at a certain point in the life of a company and sales are inherently noisy by comparison... we've moved engineering away but this still means some staff who are not in sales are impacted by sales noise. Things we got right: * The flow around the office is really nice, people interact without being forced together or too far apart * 3 showers for 100 people is enough that no-one waits long even when a quarter of staff are cycling in the height of Summer because we don't dictate a start hour to all staff (only those covering shifts) What you build is according to needs, but growth dictates almost everything. You may not even stay in your new fancy office for more than a couple of years if your growth is that good, and this is going to dictate your spend. Ultimately for it to make sense to design an office, the amortized costs need to be competitive with hiring space from Regus or something. If you've gone too far down the path of a design that involves putting up internal walls and spaces that need ripping down to handle growth, then the project is probably doomed to fail.