Spaces · Kadıköy, Istanbul
Office Interior Design
Turnkey Design & Construction
Office interior design is the design and construction work that resolves a workspace — its layout, acoustics, lighting and technical services — around the work of the team who spend the day there and the first impression it makes on a visitor.
Our Kadıköy-based studio has run design and construction under one roof since 2015. A number of the 94+ projects we have completed are offices; the Y.S. Real Estate Office in Arnavutköy and the HD Law Office in Kadıköy are two of them. The sections below set out, in order, what we look at in an office project.
Where does an office plan begin?
Not with square metres, but with how the work actually gets done. Does the team spend most of the day at a screen, on the phone, or talking to one another; how many people are in the office at the same time; how often do visitors come and how far in do they go. The answers to these questions produce two entirely different plans in the same floor area.
- The highest number of people in the office at any one time — the number of fixed desks is set by this figure, not by total headcount.
- The deepest point a visitor reaches: reception, the meeting room, or the working area itself.
- How many people need to talk behind a closed door during the day — this number determines the need for enclosed rooms directly.
- The volume of everything that has to be stored physically: archives, samples, stationery.
- The likelihood of the team growing over the next few years, and the flexibility the plan has to leave for it.
How much space is allowed per person?
Desk dimensions on their own do not tell you whether an office is adequate; what decides it is the sum of desk, circulation and shared areas. In most office planning the desk depth is kept at around 70-80 cm, with roughly a further metre left behind the desk so the chair can be pushed back. Corridors used by one person generally do not fall below 90 cm, and the main circulation routes where two people may pass do not fall below 120 cm.
The most common mistake is to divide the whole area into desks and leave no room for meetings, phone calls or breaks. An office like that holds more people on paper; in use it produces less work, because every conversation ends up taking place at somebody's desk.
Open-plan office or separate rooms?
There is no situation in which either is the right answer on its own. An open layout is flexible, speeds up communication within the team and yields more desks from the same area; the price is focus and speech privacy. A layout of separate rooms protects both, but spends more area on circulation and is hard to rearrange when the team grows.
In most projects the outcome is a hybrid: an open working area, one or two enclosed focus or phone rooms beside it, and a separate meeting room. The way to take the benefit of an open-plan office without paying its price is to keep the enclosed alternatives on the same floor, a few steps away; a focus room that is a nuisance to walk to goes unused.
Office acoustics: how is speech privacy achieved?
Acoustics in an office are two separate problems: sound that disturbs, and speech that should not be overheard. The first is a matter of comfort, the second of privacy, and the remedies differ. Acoustics is the heading most often neglected in office projects, and the one that makes the greatest difference in daily use.
- The proportion of sound-absorbing surfaces: in a space dominated by glass, plasterboard and ceramic, sound does not die away. An acoustic suspended ceiling, carpet, curtains and wall panels are the surfaces that restore that balance.
- The walls of meeting and consultation rooms: a partition that stops at the suspended ceiling carries sound over the ceiling void into the room next door. These walls need to run from slab to slab.
- The door detail: an unsealed door in an insulated wall largely cancels out the work that wall is doing.
- Ventilation ductwork: connecting two rooms to the same duct opens a direct path for sound between them.
- Equipment noise: the printer, the comms cabinet and the air-conditioning indoor unit are moved to a point well away from the desks.
Lighting: light that does not reflect off the screen
The problem in office lighting is usually not the quantity of light but its direction. A window behind the screen creates both a silhouette and glare; a window directly opposite reflects in the screen. Desks are therefore set perpendicular to the window in most plans, so daylight falls on the desk rather than the screen.
With artificial light, separating general lighting from task lighting is what works. In office installations an illuminance of around 500 lux is generally targeted at the desk surface; trying to achieve that from the ceiling alone over-lights the whole space and increases glare. In areas where screen-based work is done, fittings with a low glare rating are preferred. We have set out the logic of the layered approach in detail in our note on lighting layers.
Cabling, sockets and technical services
The item most regretted afterwards in an office is the electrical and data infrastructure, because changing it means opening up a wall or a floor. That is why we do not freeze the positions of sockets and data outlets until the furniture layout is settled.
- Requirements per desk: most projects allow for at least one screen, one laptop and one charging point per person; at island desks away from a wall, the cable drops through the desk leg into the floor.
- In the meeting room, sockets and a data outlet in the centre of the table, with a concealed route as far as the wall for a screen or projector.
- Wireless access points are marked on the ceiling plan from the outset; cable pulled in later stays visible and damages the suspended ceiling.
- A position for the separate panel or cabinet serving the network, cameras, alarm and door systems is set aside in the plan in advance.
- The multifunction printer sits in a recess of its own rather than on a circulation route, both for its noise and the paper traffic around it.
Storage, archiving and climate control
Storage is the item most underestimated in an office brief. Paper has diminished but has not gone: contract and document archives, stationery, cleaning materials, and kitchen and refreshment equipment all still ask for space. Keeping documents containing personal data in lockable cabinets is also consistent with the physical security measures expected under Turkey's personal data protection law.
In climate control, two details settle day-to-day comfort: that the indoor unit does not blow directly onto anyone, and that the summer-to-winter difference at desks near a glazed façade is taken into account. In crowded meeting rooms the need for fresh air makes itself felt more quickly the smaller the room is.
The reception area and carrying brand identity into the space
Reception is where a visitor forms a first judgement about the company, and that judgement is usually made in the first few minutes of sitting and waiting. Where the person waiting will look, whether it is clear who they should speak to, and whether they pass through the working area on the way to the meeting room: all of this shows the area is as much a question of planning as of representation.
Carrying a corporate identity into a space usually means not applying the brand colour literally to a wall, but working the tone of that identity into the texture of the materials, the junction details and the warmth of the lighting. Hanging the logo on the wall may be the result of that work; it is not the method.
Why are law, finance and consultancy offices handled differently?
In these offices privacy is not a preference about comfort but a requirement of the work. A consultation room separated from the open working area by both sound and sight, a waiting arrangement in which two different clients will not see one another, screens turned so they cannot be read from the door or the waiting axis, and filing cabinets that lock — in projects of this kind these are discussed at the planning stage; when they are left to be solved with furniture afterwards, the result always falls short.
From our completed projects
HD Law Office (Kadıköy) and Y.S. Real Estate Office (Arnavutköy) are two of the office projects we have completed; the photographs and project details are on their own pages.
We have described how the process runs and what is settled at which stage in our turnkey interior design guide. You may also want to look at clinic interior design, where similar questions of privacy and acoustics arise in an entirely different form, and retail interior design, where customer flow is the deciding factor; every type of space we work on is listed on our spaces page.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much space should be allowed per person in an office?
There is no single correct figure; what decides it is not the desk itself but the sum of desk, circulation and shared areas. In most planning the desk depth is kept at around 70-80 cm, with roughly a metre left behind it for the chair, and the main circulation routes do not fall below 120 cm. A per-person calculation made without allowing for meeting, phone and break areas does not hold up in use.
Which is more productive, an open-plan or a cellular office?
It depends on the kind of work. An open layout speeds up communication and uses the area efficiently, but makes focus and speech privacy harder; a cellular layout does the opposite. In most projects the most balanced outcome comes from a hybrid arrangement: an open working area with one or two enclosed focus rooms and a separate meeting room beside it.
How can noise and sound leakage be reduced in an office?
First the proportion of hard surfaces is brought down: an acoustic ceiling, carpet, curtains and panels absorb sound. To stop speech carrying into the next room, partition walls have to run from slab to slab rather than stopping at the suspended ceiling, doors need seals, and two rooms should not be connected to the same ventilation duct. An ordinary door in an insulated wall largely cancels out the effect of that wall.
Can an office be refurbished without stopping work?
Depending on the scope it is usually possible; the work is divided into zones and the team moved through them in turn, with noisy trades scheduled outside working hours. In projects where the electrical and mechanical services are being renewed completely, however, vacating the premises for a short period generally gives a faster and cheaper result. We decide together which of the two suits at the first site survey.
Is office design handled differently for hybrid or remote teams?
Yes — it calls for fewer fixed desks and more shared meeting and focus space. The number of fixed desks is set by the highest number of people in the office at any one time rather than by total headcount; at the same time, because the number of online meetings rises, small acoustically separated rooms become more important.
Can you make use of our existing furniture when we move office?
Where possible, yes — we would rather bring the existing inventory into the new arrangement than buy everything new. At the site survey we work out together which pieces suit the move and the new plan, and which are better replaced.