One of Paragon Insurance’s boardrooms in the City of London. Barely used for most of the year, and worth every penny.

Insurance is a waste of money, until it isn’t. The same goes for the empty spaces in an office.

A waste of money, until it isn’t

Insurance is a waste of money. Every year you pay the premium, nothing burns down, nobody sues, and the money is simply gone.

Until the year it isn’t.

Nobody sensible reads their policy as wasted because they didn’t claim on it. They understand they were paying for readiness. Yet when it comes to the office, that same logic disappears. A room that sits empty most of the week is called slack, and slack is something to be designed out.

Two boardrooms, used once a year

Some years ago we worked with Paragon Insurance on their offices on Leadenhall Street, in the City of London. The brief included not one but two boardrooms. They were large, beautifully finished and very expensive.

For most of the year, they were barely used. When they were, it was usually two people perched at the end of an enormous table in an enormous room, holding a meeting that would have worked just as well in a room a tenth of the size. On paper, even that counts as use.

Then, once a year, the client’s biggest customers came to London to hold a beauty parade for their professional indemnity cover. Insurers competed for the business face to face. For those few days, those two rooms were the most important space in the building. They were where the year’s largest decisions were made about where the business would be placed.

Run those rooms through a utilisation report and the answer is obvious: get rid of them, or at least shrink them. Run them through the business and the answer is just as obvious: you can’t afford not to have them.

What the numbers say

The industry has never measured offices more closely, and the averages all point the same way: less.

• UK desk provision fell from 79 desks per 100 employees in 2022 to 56 by late 2024, according to AWA’s Hybrid Working Index.
• The British Council for Offices says utilisation has settled at 66%, against the old 80% benchmark (BCO).
• CBRE puts average building utilisation at 53% (Facilities Dive).

Read those figures alone and the conclusion writes itself. Fewer desks, fewer rooms, less space.

But look at the peaks. CBRE’s 2026 benchmark found that Tuesday and Thursday occupancy now runs above the levels seen before the pandemic, while Friday attendance has halved (CBRE). Average peak utilisation reaches 80%. A building that looks 40% full on paper can run out of meeting rooms before eleven on a Tuesday morning.

Why the average is the wrong brief

An average tells you what is cheap to provide. It doesn’t tell you what the business can’t do without.

The Tuesday scramble and the boardroom used once a year are the same mistake, seen from opposite ends. Both come from sizing a workplace by its typical day instead of by the moments that matter. Design to the average and you get an office that works perfectly on a day nobody remembers, and fails on the days everyone does.

No one measures a navy by how often it fires. The value of readiness is that it’s there when it’s needed. A good office works the same way: some of its most important spaces will look idle on any given afternoon.

That doesn’t mean every empty room is justified. Plenty of slack is just waste, and a lot of space can work harder. But the test isn’t how often a room is used. It’s what it costs the business on the day the room isn’t there.

How to brief for need

A good brief starts with what people need to do, not how many of them there are. In practice that means asking different questions at the first meeting.

1. What are the moments that matter? The client pitch, the board meeting, the company meeting, the busiest Tuesday. List them before you count a single desk.
2. What does each moment need? A room that impresses, quiet for focused work, space for the whole team at once, somewhere private to take a call.
3. What does it cost to get it wrong? A lost client, a team that stops coming in, a meeting held in a café. That cost is your premium.
4. Design for those moments first. Then let the everyday fill the space around them.
5. Accept the slack, and manage it. Some space will sit idle. Decide which idle space is worth paying for, and stop apologising for it.

There is more on this in ten things to consider before starting an office project in the age of AI.

An insurer understood it first

Looking back, it’s no surprise the client who insisted on those two boardrooms was an insurer. Their whole business is selling readiness. They knew the value of a policy isn’t measured in the years nothing happens. It’s measured on the day something does.

Their boardrooms were a premium, paid every year, for a few days that decided where their biggest customers’ business went. Nobody in that building called them a waste.

The empty room isn’t always the problem. Sometimes it’s the policy that pays out.

The post The Boardroom Nobody Used, and Why It Was Worth Every Penny appeared first on Business Interiors.

To put it in perspective, only a few years ago you would have called a company like Business Interiors and perhaps two or three similar companies. We would have visited, discussed what you wanted and gone away to work on some ideas. A few weeks later, you might have had three first draft proposals. You may or may not have paid for them, but across those companies thousands of pounds of working time could have been spent coming up with the designs. You would start down the route of the design you liked best, Business Interiors would win, of course, and a few months later you would have a new reception along the lines of the concept presented all that time ago.

Now AI is producing a visual of the finished result that you may be happy with in minutes. That design might already appeal to you more than anything the three companies produced in weeks at considerable cost. Even if it does not, the reception of your dreams could be another prompt away. You effectively have an incredibly capable design partner living in your phone, available whenever you want to try something. It is difficult to overstate how much that changes the beginning of a project.

From the drawing board to the finished canteen

Take the staff canteen we designed and built for South West Communications in Exeter. Here is our original design visual, followed by a photograph of what we actually built. Different viewpoints, but you can recognise the long orange bench, the communal table, the lounge seating and the sculptural lights. Even the landscape on the wall evolved as the design developed. This was how we worked before AI: develop the design, show the client what we had in mind, agree the details and deliver it.

The same room. Three new ideas. Roughly two minutes.

We then gave AI the photograph of the completed canteen and asked for three different approaches, keeping the same room and viewpoint. These are the results. All three were generated in roughly two minutes. You might prefer our original, or you might prefer one of these. The extraordinary thing is how quickly we now have three completely different ideas worth discussing. Imagine doing that while we are sitting together at the first meeting.

Although this is massively disruptive, at Business Interiors we find it incredibly inspiring. In many respects, clients still fall into the same two categories they always did. There is the client who has a clear idea of what they want, which informs the brief, and the client who knows they have an issue but has no idea how to solve it. The difference is how quickly either can now move forward. The first can show us images and a brief they have already developed with AI, taking a mountain of work off our hands and allowing us to concentrate on making it happen. With the second, we can get our phone out and start exploring concepts together.

The power of showing somebody an idea there and then, in the first meeting, is enormous. They can react to it, explain what they like and change what they do not. Equally, if the client has already done much of that themselves, the same thing happens in reverse. They inform us. Either way, the project can clear a labour intensive hurdle in minutes rather than weeks. Sometimes projects never cleared that hurdle at all. Now the conversation can be happening deep into the next phase from the outset.

Five things this means

1. Clients are far better informed

Clients can explore ideas, investigate materials and develop their thinking before they call us. They can show us what they mean rather than struggle to describe it, and they can question what we propose with a much clearer idea of the alternatives. Anyone who has discussed an office brief knows that “modern” or “welcoming” can mean completely different things to different people. An image gets us into a meaningful conversation much more quickly. We spend less time trying to understand what somebody has in mind and more time working out how to achieve it. We have always liked clients with ideas, and if they arrive with a better idea than ours, so much the better.

2. Designs evolve on steroids

Multiple iterations can be tried quickly, which means ideas that might previously have been abandoned for lack of time or budget can be properly explored. Try a different layout, change the materials, do something completely unexpected and see what happens. You no longer have to wait until the next meeting to discover whether an alternative was worth pursuing. It is hard not to believe that our built environment will improve as a result. More people will have access to good design ideas, more options will get considered and there will be fewer excuses for settling for something uninspiring.

Perhaps the days when walking into an office that “someone else built” fills us with dismay will become less frequent. We have certainly seen spaces where you wonder how anyone thought that was the best answer. Some of the mistakes made by less experienced firms should start to dry up as better alternatives become easier to produce and compare. Experienced designers can push their ideas further too. The design of the world around us could become incredible, and that is good for everyone. We spend too much of our lives in buildings to be indifferent about whether they are enjoyable places to be.

3. The value a company like Business Interiors brings will shift

Before AI, we differentiated ourselves by producing the best designs. People came to us because they trusted us to imagine the best space for them. If that part of the design process is becoming a commodity, then interpreting those designs becomes increasingly important. Can it be built? What will it cost? How do we achieve what the client loves about it within the money they have available? Cost analysis, designing to a price, technical knowledge and project management all become a larger part of the value we bring. There is a considerable difference between making something look expensive and making it expensive, and knowing how to achieve the former without the latter takes experience.

Essentially, the difficult part of the process starts to shift away from producing concepts at a desk and towards working out how to deliver them. The funny thing is that the tension between project management and design will remain. On site, people used to pull their hair out at indulgent designers who wanted floating staircases and all sorts of things that looked wonderful on paper. Now humans will be scratching their heads at AI. At least the drawings should be quicker to develop and revise, although somebody will still need to make sure the staircase stays up. We suspect the conversations on site will remain fairly familiar.

4. Changes should be minimised and costs reduced

If the design is properly explored and agreed earlier, there should be less need to adapt it on the fly. Clients sometimes change their minds during construction because it is the first time they have really understood what they are getting. That is an expensive moment to discover you do not like something. Being able to try alternatives quickly, see the result and incorporate changes before work starts gives everyone a better chance of getting it right first time.

That early agreement needs to carry through into the details, specifications and prices, but the opportunity is obvious. Fewer changes during the build should mean less work being undone, fewer materials being reordered and less time spent resolving decisions that could have been made weeks earlier. Buildings will still throw up surprises. We do not need to add uncertainty about the design to the list. Changing a reception desk on a screen is a great deal easier than changing it after the joiner has made it.

5. Someone still has to build it to a price

One thing AI cannot do on its own is commit to building that reception for an agreed price and then turn up to deliver it. That comes down to humans on the ground. Somebody has to get reliable prices, order the materials, organise the trades, manage the programme and take responsibility for the finished job. Eventually those people will be assisted by robot workers too, but for now there is still a considerable amount of very human work between the picture on the phone and the reception you walk into.

The human value runs through the whole process. It starts with steering AI towards a better result, asking the right questions and recognising which ideas are worth developing. It continues through the practical decisions that make the design affordable and buildable. Then it is over to a firm that can deliver on time and on budget. The fact that the client can now produce a beautiful concept themselves makes that ability to deliver more important, because their expectations will be high from the outset.

Imagine what we could build

We find all of this enormously exciting. We have spent our working lives believing that good design makes a difference to how people feel, how businesses present themselves and how much they enjoy the places where they spend their time. Now far more people can explore those possibilities themselves, and those of us working in the industry have extraordinary tools to help them. Of course it will change how we work and what clients pay us for. It would be strange if something this powerful did not.

But think about what the result could be. Better spaces, more imagination, clients who can explain what they want and designers who can explore ideas they would previously never have had time to develop. We could see a remarkable improvement in the buildings and interiors around us, and we should be enthusiastic about that. Someone has got to build this new built environment, and that is an opportunity for companies like Business Interiors too. We are looking forward to being part of it.

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Yes, this is a real photograph, not AI. It is Paragon Insurance’s convertible table tennis meeting table, in their City of London office.

The checklist we first published in 2011, rewritten for an age when hybrid working has changed where people work and AI is changing the work itself.

In 2011 we published ten things to consider before you do anything with your office. Much of it still holds: get the budget right, don’t try to do it all yourself, choose your partner carefully. But the questions have moved on. Here is the list rewritten for an office brief today.

1. Don’t start with headcount

The old brief began with a number: how many people, how many desks. That number now tells you less than it used to. The British Council for Offices found that average office utilisation across the working week has settled at about 30%, compared with 44% before the pandemic ¹. And as AI takes on more routine work, headcount will tell you even less about what your business actually does. Start with activities instead: what people need to do, together and alone, and how often.

2. Plan for your busiest day, not the average

Most offices have a busiest day, and it is well above the weekly average. In the same BCO research, Tuesday to Thursday averaged 40%, against 30% across the whole week ¹. Plan for the average and there will be nowhere to sit on your busiest day, and people will quietly stop coming in. Measure your own pattern, add a sensible margin and give the overflow somewhere good to go. Our guide to how much office space you need now shows how.

3. Ask what makes the journey worthwhile

A desk alone isn’t always enough to justify the journey. People come in to work through problems together, learn from colleagues, meet clients and feel part of something. Design for those first. If the honest answer to “why come in?” is “because we told you to”, the office has already lost.

4. Seat your juniors near your experience

Hybrid working quietly broke the way most people learned their trade: by sitting near someone who was better at the job. AI can now supply much of the knowledge, but not the judgement, the relationships or the commercial instinct. Plan shared office days and seating so the people who are learning sit near the people they are learning from.

5. Don’t shrink in a panic

Less space can be exactly the right answer. But in CBRE’s 2025 survey of European office occupiers, companies that had previously downsized too much and were now expanding made up 21%, up from 7% in 2024 ². Cut on evidence, keep your options open with break clauses and room to grow, and treat the space you free up as an opportunity, not just a saving.

6. Make the quiet as good as the buzz

The collaboration hub gets the photographs, but the quiet room does the work. Leesman found that 89% of employees say focused individual work is an important activity, yet only 35% are satisfied with noise levels ³. If AI absorbs more of the routine tasks, the balance of work may shift towards tasks requiring greater concentration and judgement. Build places to think.

7. Design for the people who aren’t in the room

Most meetings now include someone on a screen, and increasingly an AI assistant taking the notes. Cameras, microphones, acoustics, room booking and power need designing in from the start, not adding at the end. A handsome meeting room where half the meeting can’t hear is a failed room.

8. Leave room to change your mind

Nobody knows exactly how AI will reshape your teams over the life of a lease. That is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to stay flexible: furniture that moves, rooms that can change use, technology that can be upgraded and a lease that doesn’t lock you in. Test more than one future: fewer people, a growing business, different teams. A good brief should accommodate more than one forecast.

9. Be honest about the budget, and the carbon

Fit-out costs are easy to misjudge. Knight Frank’s spring 2026 guide puts a medium-specification London fit-out at about £175 per sq ft, delivered from a landlord’s Cat A and including furniture, AV and professional fees, but excluding IT hardware ⁴. So ask exactly what every quote includes. The cheapest and lowest-carbon fit-out is often the one you don’t rip out: keep what works, reuse what you can and check the building’s energy rating before you sign. Our guides to Cat A and Cat B fit-out and sustainable fit-out go into the detail.

10. Don’t outsource the thinking

AI will happily produce a floor plan, a mood board and a cost plan before lunch. Use it: it is quick, and it will prompt good questions. It will also get better at understanding people and buildings. But the lasting difference is accountability. Someone has to verify the assumptions, coordinate the design and take responsibility for delivery, including being on site when the ceiling grid doesn’t line up with the partitions. The 2011 list warned against trying to do everything yourself. The new version: don’t hand the responsibility to the machine either. Choose people who have done this before, ask to see completed projects and speak to their clients.

And one thing that hasn’t changed

The original list ended with image, and it still holds. Your office is the clearest signal of what kind of organisation you are. What it signals is changing: less about how many people you employ, more about how well they work together.

If you would like a second opinion on any of the ten, start a conversation.

Sources

1. British Council for Offices, Review of Post-Pandemic UK Office Utilisation (July 2025), p. 7
2. CBRE, European Office Occupier Sentiment Survey 2025
3. Leesman, Noisy spaces, quiet consequences (March 2026)
4. Knight Frank, Occupier Fit-Out Cost Guide, Spring 2026

Figures checked against these sources on 22 October 2026.

The post Ten things to consider before starting an office project in the age of AI appeared first on Business Interiors.

Once upon a time, you could walk into a company’s offices and learn quite a lot about the business. The number of people milling around gave you an indication of its size. The quality of the furniture, architecture and finishes suggested something about its profitability. The layout told you whether the organisation was progressive, collaborative and forward-thinking, or still operating in the past. A large, impressive headquarters was a statement of success.

But walk into that same headquarters today and you might find yourself asking a rather different question. Has this business noticed the tsunami? Not the one that’s coming. The one that’s already arrived.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to change the economics of business so profoundly that some of our most basic assumptions about organisations – how many people they need, how they are managed and where they work – may no longer hold. And the office, perhaps more than anything else, is about to reveal which businesses understand that change.

The workforce you can’t see

Imagine two companies. The first employs 100 people. It has departments for finance, marketing, administration, research, sales and management. It occupies a substantial office, with all the associated costs. The second employs ten people, but behind each of those ten sits an increasingly capable team of AI agents: researchers, analysts, designers, administrators, financial advisers, marketing specialists and project coordinators. They work around the clock, can be deployed almost instantly and can be scaled up or down as required. They don’t need desks, they don’t commute and they don’t need meeting rooms, kitchens or parking spaces.

The second company might have the productive capacity of an organisation many times its physical size. Of course, AI agents aren’t literally employees. They still make mistakes, need supervision and cannot simply take responsibility for every task. Nor is the arrival of genuinely superintelligent systems a settled fact. But the direction is becoming difficult to ignore. The number of people you can see is no longer a reliable measure of what a business can do, and that changes everything.

Small businesses have always enjoyed certain advantages. They can make decisions quickly, they are close to their customers and they don’t need committees to approve every idea. Large businesses have traditionally compensated with scale: greater resources, specialist departments, financial strength, established relationships and powerful brands. AI threatens to alter that balance, because many of the capabilities that once required substantial organisational infrastructure are becoming available to individuals and very small teams.

A talented salesperson, for example, might once have depended on an entire supporting organisation to research prospects, prepare quotations, produce presentations, analyse costs and coordinate delivery. Now imagine that same salesperson with an extraordinarily capable virtual team. As their business grows, more resources can flow behind them without the same increase in permanent overhead. In effect, the salesperson becomes the managing director of a small business operating within a larger one. A company employing 100 salespeople might therefore be better understood as 100 entrepreneurial businesses sharing a brand, reputation, capital and infrastructure.

The challenge for management is no longer simply to supervise those people. It is to create the conditions in which each of them can become exceptionally productive. Perhaps the answer for large organisations isn’t to become smaller, but to become collections of smaller businesses: small, accountable teams, empowered to make decisions, supported by shared resources and connected to a common intelligence. The centre still matters. It provides direction, financial discipline, governance and the collective strength of the brand. But knowledge and resources flow in both directions, without every decision having to climb a management hierarchy and come back down again.

A commercial battle at the speed of light

There is a temptation to see AI mainly as an opportunity to increase profitability. If a business can produce the same output with fewer resources, surely its margins will improve. At first, perhaps. But competition has an inconvenient habit of passing the benefits of innovation on to customers. When one business can deliver something faster and more cheaply, others must respond. Prices come under pressure, expectations rise and what was an extraordinary capability yesterday becomes the minimum requirement tomorrow.

This is how business has always worked. The difference is speed. In the past, a competitor’s advantage might take years to establish through new factories, new processes, new markets or new skills. Today, a significant advance in AI can change the economics of a business process with a software update. The time available to recognise change and respond to it is shrinking. This is becoming a commercial battle at the speed of light, and you cannot fight it with an organisational structure that takes six months to make a decision.

The businesses that succeed won’t necessarily be those with the most AI. They’ll be those that can turn new intelligence into better decisions and decisive action. That still requires people, but perhaps not the same number of people, doing the same jobs, in the same hierarchy.

For generations, knowledge helped determine someone’s position within an organisation. Qualifications, technical expertise and decades of accumulated experience were valuable partly because that knowledge was hard to acquire. The more you knew, the more others depended on you. Now imagine an ambitious 25-year-old with exceptional energy, intuition and emotional intelligence, supported by AI that can give specialist advice across an enormous range of subjects. That person may be able to make better-informed decisions, more quickly, than someone who relies solely on experience accumulated over 30 years.

Experience still matters enormously. So does the ability to recognise poor advice, understand context and take responsibility when things go wrong. But knowledge is becoming less scarce. As it becomes more widely accessible, other qualities become more important: judgement, initiative, adaptability, leadership, trust and the ability to understand people and bring them together. The brilliant employee of tomorrow may not be the person who knows the most. It may be the person who can do the most with what everyone can now know.

What is the office actually for?

For many office-based businesses, two of their largest costs are people and property. AI has the potential to transform the economics of both. If fewer people can produce more, businesses may need less physical space. If administrative and analytical tasks can be done virtually, the traditional relationship between headcount and floor area begins to break down.

For the office interiors industry, that is an uncomfortable thought. We have spent decades helping organisations accommodate their people efficiently, attractively and productively. But what happens when the workforce becomes partly invisible? Do we carry on designing offices around headcount and treating the number of desks as the starting point? Or do we ask a more fundamental question about what the office is actually for?

Agile and remote working promised to liberate people from the office, and in many respects they succeeded. People discovered they could work effectively from home, avoid commuting and concentrate without the interruptions of a busy workplace. Those benefits are real and they aren’t going away. But something else happened. The informal transfer of knowledge between generations weakened. The young employee could no longer absorb the experience of older colleagues simply by sitting alongside them. Relationships became harder to build, chance encounters disappeared and people became less visible to those making decisions about opportunities and progression.

The old saying still has force: out of sight, out of mind.

Now AI adds an unexpected twist. The young employee who comes into the office, builds relationships and develops commercial instincts may also have an AI copilot that supplies much of the technical knowledge that once took years to accumulate. They are no longer necessarily waiting for the experienced colleague to teach them everything. They can arrive informed, prepared and ready to act.

And if that experienced colleague stays isolated, relying on yesterday’s expertise rather than embracing new tools and relationships, the advantage may reverse. This isn’t really about age. An experienced professional who embraces AI could be exceptionally effective. It’s about participation, adaptability and visibility. AI may make it easier than ever to work anywhere, while making it more important than ever to be somewhere. Not because every task requires an office, but because careers, businesses and opportunities are built through human relationships as well as individual output.

Here is the paradox. If AI allows businesses to operate with fewer people, we might reasonably expect offices to become less important. But perhaps the opposite is true. When intelligence is widely available, what becomes valuable is the ability to bring people together and turn that intelligence into something meaningful. Trust, collaboration, leadership, persuasion, shared ambition and a sense of belonging are not simply by-products of work. They are among the things that make organisations successful.

The office of the future may therefore need fewer conventional workstations but considerably better environments for human interaction. Spaces where people want to spend time. Places for conversation, collaboration, learning and the unexpected encounters from which ideas emerge. Environments that make people feel part of something worthwhile. Some work will always be better done quietly at home. The office doesn’t need to win every hour of every working day, but it should offer something that home working cannot easily replicate.

The objective shouldn’t be to force people back to their desks. It should be to create workplaces that people recognise are worth coming back to.

Fewer desks. Better offices.

For a long time, the office was where an organisation housed its workforce. Increasingly, that workforce may be split between a relatively small number of people and a much larger collection of virtual capabilities. The physical office can no longer be justified simply by counting employees and allocating desks. It must justify itself through the value it creates when people come together.

That is both a challenge and an opportunity, for businesses and for those of us who design their workplaces. The great office of tomorrow may be smaller than its predecessor. It may hold fewer people and look nothing like the headquarters we once associated with success. But it could be a much better place to work.

Because while artificial intelligence may transform what individuals can achieve, the best businesses will still understand how to make people achieve more together.

We may need fewer desks than ever before. But we may need better offices than ever before.

And the next time you walk into an impressive headquarters, perhaps the question won’t be how many people work there. It will be how much value the people who are there create, together with all the intelligence you cannot see.

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Start with what is already there

Any credible sustainable fit-out begins with an audit of what already exists. Work through the options in this order:

1. Keep in place. Raised floors, ceiling grids, partitions, doors and light fittings that are sound and suit the new layout.
2. Refurbish. Refinish joinery, reupholster seating, recover meeting tables.
3. Reuse from elsewhere. Move furniture and equipment from your current office, or buy from reclaimed sources.
4. Buy remanufactured. Products rebuilt by the manufacturer or a specialist, often with a warranty.
5. Buy new, carefully. Choose products with published environmental data, replaceable parts and a take-back route.

This order matters because some Cat A elements carry a lot of carbon. In a 2024 study of Cat A fit-outs, the architects AHMM found that the raised access floor alone accounted for about 29 kgCO₂/m² in three of the four designs they modelled ². A sound raised floor that stays in place avoids that carbon entirely.

Reused items still have to meet current Building Regulations and fire performance requirements, and you should check what warranty comes with them, so plan reuse early.

Circular furniture

Furniture is where occupiers have the most direct control. You can reuse your own furniture, buy refurbished or remanufactured items, use manufacturer take-back schemes, or lease furniture rather than own it. When you specify new pieces, ask for environmental product declarations, ask whether the product can be taken apart for repair, and ask how long spare parts will be available. Keep a simple inventory of what you have, so the next move starts from facts rather than a skip.

Embodied carbon: why fit-out matters

Embodied carbon is the greenhouse gas released in making, transporting, installing, maintaining and finally disposing of materials. The problem with fit-out is how often it is repeated.

The AHMM study put the upfront carbon of four Cat A designs at between 58 and 92 kgCO₂/m². It also found that small offices in the City of London have a typical lease length of 5.1 years, which implies around eight tenants, and potentially eight Cat A strip-outs, over a 60-year building life ². The Cat B work on top of each one adds further carbon.

Embodied carbon is not currently regulated for fit-outs in England, and the government has said it prefers a voluntary approach to whole-life carbon assessment. Recognised voluntary methods exist, however. RICS’s Whole life carbon assessment standard (second edition, in force since July 2024) sets out how to measure it. The UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, published in March 2026, includes upfront carbon and operational energy limits and allows landlords and tenants to claim conformity separately. At the least, ask your design team for an embodied carbon estimate of the main options, so you can compare them.

EPCs and MEES: where things stand in October 2026

In force now. Under the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES), privately rented non-domestic property in England and Wales must have an EPC rating of at least E. Since April 2023 this has applied to existing lettings as well as new ones, unless a valid exemption is registered.

Confirmed as policy, but not yet law. The government’s interim response of 18 June 2026 set out the following ¹:

• buildings over 1,000 m² will need to reach EPC B by 2031, where cost-effective
• buildings below 1,000 m² stay at EPC E, with no set deadline for going further
• the previously proposed interim EPC C requirement for 2027 has been dropped
• the seven-year payback test and the existing exemptions will remain

All of this depends on secondary legislation passing through Parliament. Further detail, including how the 1,000 m² threshold will be applied, is due in a full government response ¹. Legal commentators note that other points remain open, including enforcement, a possible short exemption for buildings let as shell and core, and possible duties on tenants not to worsen a rating.

What this means in practice. MEES obligations sit mainly with landlords, but a tenant’s fit-out can affect a building’s energy performance, and many leases already restrict alterations that would lower the EPC rating. If your lease runs beyond 2031 in a larger building, ask the landlord how it plans to reach EPC B, and whether the cost might come back to you through the service charge.

Remember too that an EPC is a modelled rating of the building, not a measurement of the energy it actually uses.

What BREEAM, NABERS UK and WELL actually measure

BREEAM is BRE’s assessment of how a project is briefed, designed and delivered. It awards credits across areas such as energy, health and wellbeing, materials, water and waste, with ratings from Pass to Outstanding. In September 2026 BRE launched Version 7 of BREEAM Refurbishment and Fit Out. It includes a separate Fit Out standard for tenant-led interior projects, with scope that can cover fabric and structure, core services, local services and interior design, and it puts more weight on carbon and predicted energy use ³. A BREEAM rating tells you how well a project was specified and delivered. It does not measure the energy the building uses once occupied.

NABERS UK measures actual energy use in offices, based on at least 12 continuous months of metered data, and rates it from one to six stars. Three stars represents the market average and six is market leading. There are separate ratings for the base building, for a tenancy (typically lighting, power and any extra cooling) and for the whole building, and each rating lasts 12 months ⁴. If you want evidence that your own floor performs well, the tenancy rating is the one to look at.

WELL, run by the International WELL Building Institute, is about occupant health rather than carbon. Its distinguishing feature is on-site performance testing of air, water, light, thermal comfort and sound. For most projects, testing is done after occupation, once the space is at least half occupied ⁵. A WELL rating says nothing about embodied carbon or energy use.

A simple test for greenwash is to ask what was measured, when it was measured, and who checked it.

Quick wins versus big decisions

Quick wins within a fit-out

• Audit existing furniture and fittings before any design starts.
• Replace carpet only where it is worn, rather than across the whole floor.
• Ask suppliers for environmental product declarations and take-back terms.
• Meter your tenancy’s energy separately so you can track it, and potentially rate it.
• Segregate site waste and agree reuse or donation routes for anything removed.

Big decisions that deserve proper analysis

• Whether to stay and refurbish or move, including the carbon cost of a whole new fit-out.
• Which building to choose: its EPC, any NABERS UK rating, and the landlord’s plans for 2031.
• Whether to accept, adapt or ask the landlord to leave out a speculative Cat A.
• Whether a certification is worth pursuing, and which one matches what you want to prove.

Sources

1. GOV.UK, Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES) in the non-domestic private rented sector: interim response (18 June 2026)
2. AHMM, Fit Out Rip Out: A Study on the Carbon Cost of Cat A (March 2024)
3. BRE, BRE launches BREEAM Refurbishment and Fit Out Commercial Version 7 (September 2026)
4. NABERS, NABERS UK Energy for Offices Rules, Version 2.0 (March 2023)
5. International WELL Building Institute, WELL Performance Verification Guidebook (Q3 2025)

The regulatory position was checked against the sources listed in October 2026. The 2031 EPC B requirement still depends on secondary legislation, so check the current position before relying on it.

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What the evidence says

Hybrid working is now an established pattern for a large minority of people, not for everyone. The Office for National Statistics found that 28% of working adults in Great Britain worked a hybrid pattern in early 2025. The share was much higher among graduates (41%) and people earning £50,000 or more (45%) ². A professional services firm and a contact centre will therefore need very different offices.

The fullest UK review of how offices are actually used is the BCO’s 2025 Review of Post-Pandemic UK Office Utilisation. It found that average UK desk utilisation across the working week has settled at about 30%, against about 44% before the pandemic. The Tuesday-to-Thursday average is about 40% ¹. Results varied widely between buildings, from 13% to 53% on average, so a national benchmark is only a starting point. Swipe-card data quoted in the review showed the typical weekly pattern: about 25% on Mondays, 37% from Tuesday to Thursday and 19% on Fridays ¹.

Occupier surveys use different methods and report higher figures, but the pattern is the same. CBRE’s 2025 European occupier survey recorded average weekly utilisation of 46% and an average peak day of 71% ³. Whichever figure you use, the busiest day is well above the average.

Plan for the peak, not the average

If you plan to a 40% weekly average, there will not be enough room on Wednesdays. The BCO review recommends planning for the peak or mid-week level. Where an organisation does not yet know its own pattern, it suggests assuming about two-thirds of people are in as a lower-risk default. It also advises adding some spare desks and having a fallback for the rare day when nearly everyone comes in, such as touchdown points, breakout areas and focus rooms that can take the overflow ¹.

A sharing ratio is simply people divided by desks. The BCO review calculates it in one of two ways: 100% divided by peak utilisation, or a target utilisation (often 80%) divided by average utilisation. Its worked examples range from about 1.1:1, for a contact centre with a 90% peak, to about 2:1 where the peak is 50% ¹.

As an illustration only: suppose 120 staff, and a study shows the busiest day reaching 60%, or 72 people. Adding a margin for growth and visitors might give 80 desks, a ratio of 1.5:1. The ratio follows from the data. Do not pick it first.

The market is moving towards higher ratios. CBRE found that the share of occupiers using 1 to 1.5 people per desk is expected to fall from 53% to 28% within two years, and that unassigned desks are now the norm for 61% of occupiers ³. The same survey also found that 21% of companies which had cut their space too far were now expanding again, up from 7% the year before ³. Cutting too hard has a cost.

From desks to a range of settings

When fewer desks are needed, the space should usually be given new uses rather than simply removed. People come into the office to meet and collaborate, but they still need to concentrate while they are there. Leesman’s 2026 analysis found that 89% of employees rate focused individual work as important, yet only 35% are satisfied with noise levels ⁴.

A balanced hybrid floor usually includes:

• small meeting rooms for two to four people, which the BCO review notes can also absorb peak demand when used by one or two people ¹
• enclosed booths for video calls
• a genuinely quiet area for focused work
• larger project or team rooms that can be booked for several days at a time
• social and breakout space that doubles as overflow seating

For general office space, the BCO has proposed designing for 10 to 12 m² per planned occupant, a more generous allowance than before the pandemic ¹.

How to run a utilisation study

1. Decide what you need to know. Desk use, meeting room use, team patterns, day-of-week peaks.
2. Choose the methods, knowing their limits. Access-card data is cheap but shows who entered the building, not which desks were used. Desk bookings overstate use unless people have to check in. Sensors give continuous data but may miss desks left briefly with belongings on them. Walk-through observation, usually hourly over one or two weeks, covers every type of space but takes a lot of labour. Staff surveys are inexpensive, but people tend to overestimate how often they are in the office ¹.
3. Pick a representative period. Avoid school holidays and unusual weeks. The BCO warns that short studies can be distorted by seasonal variation ¹.
4. Record meeting rooms properly. Compare bookings with actual use, and room size with group size.
5. Check the numbers with managers. Ask about planned attendance policies, recruitment and team changes. The BCO recommends verifying data with department heads ¹.
6. Model several scenarios. For example, the current pattern, a policy of set office days, and growth.

What it means for lease decisions

Occupiers are reconsidering their options. In Irwin Mitchell’s 2026 survey of 500 UK office decision-makers, reconfiguring existing space remained the most common plan (43.4%). The share planning to relocate rose to 31.6% from 23.2%, and 78% expected office attendance to rise in the coming year ⁵.

That has practical consequences:

• Do not sign up for space based only on headcount. Use peak data, plus a sensible margin.
• Build in flexibility. Break options, rights over adjoining space, or a smaller core office with flexible space for overflow. CBRE found occupiers aiming to hold 29% of their portfolios in flexible space by 2027 ³.
• Consider reconfiguring before moving. A replanned existing office can sometimes cope with the new pattern at lower cost and disruption.
• Ask about shared facilities. In multi-tenant buildings, shared meeting suites or overflow co-working space can cover occasional peaks, an approach the BCO review also suggests ¹.
• Test against the busy day. If people regularly cannot find a seat mid-week, they will stay at home, and the office will fail at the job it was meant to do.

Sources

1. British Council for Offices, Review of Post-Pandemic UK Office Utilisation (Dr Nigel Oseland, July 2025)
2. Office for National Statistics, Who has access to hybrid work in Great Britain? (June 2025)
3. CBRE, European Office Occupier Sentiment Survey 2025 (October 2025)
4. Leesman, Noisy spaces, quiet consequences (March 2026)
5. Irwin Mitchell, Office Occupiers Survey 2026 (June 2026)

Figures were checked against the sources listed in October 2026. Benchmarks vary widely between buildings, so use them to frame your own study, not to replace it.

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Why the labels matter

The categories describe how far a floor has been finished before an occupier moves in. The industry has no fixed definition of them, so two buildings both advertised as “Cat A” can differ a great deal ¹. Compare specifications, not labels.

Shell and core

This is the landlord’s base building: the structure, the cladding and the main plant, plus the shared parts such as the entrance, lifts, stairs and core toilets ¹. The office floors may be bare slab, with services ending at the core. This gives you the most freedom, but everything between floor and ceiling slab becomes your cost and your programme.

Cat A: a usable but empty floor

Cat A turns a shell floor into lettable space. Typical items include ¹:

• raised access floor and suspended ceiling
• heating, cooling and ventilation distributed across the floor
• general open-plan lighting
• fire alarm, emergency lighting and sprinklers where the building has them
• electrical distribution boards and floor boxes
• blinds and basic statutory signage

Cat A does not usually include partitions, meeting rooms, a kitchen or tea point, a reception within your demise, furniture, data cabling, audio-visual equipment or branding. Some landlords include carpet tiles and some do not.

The landlord or developer normally pays for Cat A. A tenant with unusual requirements sometimes contributes, or a landlord may ask the tenant’s contractor to carry out parts of the Cat A alongside the Cat B and pay what it would otherwise have spent ¹.

Cat B: making it your office

Cat B covers everything that makes the floor work for your organisation: partitions, meeting and quiet rooms, kitchen and breakout areas, reception, feature and task lighting, data and AV, furniture, finishes, signage and any specialist rooms ¹. The tenant pays, sometimes helped by a landlord’s capital contribution or a rent-free period.

Cat B almost always means changing some of the Cat A. New rooms need their own fire detection, emergency lighting and ventilation. Ceiling grilles and fan coil units may need moving, and sprinkler heads may need adapting. These changes are easy to miss at budget stage.

Cat A+ and plug-and-play

Cat A+ sits between the two. The landlord installs a generic, ready-to-use fit-out, typically meeting rooms in neutral finishes and a kitchen, and sometimes furniture and data. The occupier avoids the up-front capital, the time and the management effort of procuring its own fit-out, which suits businesses that need to move quickly ².

The landlord still has to recover its outlay, so rent and incentives will differ from a Cat A deal. Because the layout is generic, it may not suit an occupier with specific operational or brand requirements ². Before signing, find out what you are allowed to change, who owns and maintains the furniture and equipment, and what happens to it at the end of the lease.

The waste problem with speculative Cat A

The British Council for Offices (BCO) report Circular Economy in Offices noted that incoming occupiers often strip out speculative Cat A finishes and fittings to install their own, which creates avoidable waste. It recommended dropping Cat A unless the incoming occupier asks for it, and fitting out a single floor as a showroom where marketing needs one ⁴.

If you are taking a floor that has not been fitted out yet, ask the landlord to leave out the Cat A elements you would remove anyway, or to adjust them to your layout. The money saved can sometimes go towards your own works instead. Landlord contributions and rent-free periods are treated differently for tax and VAT, so take advice on how any arrangement is structured.

Common budgeting traps

Comparing rates measured on different bases. Knight Frank’s spring 2026 occupier guide gives indicative London fit-out costs, starting from a landlord’s Cat A, of about £100 per sq ft for a basic scheme, £175 for a mid-range one and £250 or more at the top end. The guide also gives regional adjustments, for example about 15% lower in the South West and 20% lower in the West Midlands ³. Those figures include construction, furniture, AV and professional fees. Other quotes may cover construction alone. Always ask what is included and whether VAT is in or out.

Items outside the rate. The same guide excludes IT hardware and any consultant or base-building costs of achieving a sustainability or wellbeing accreditation ³. Add those separately if they apply.

Changes to the Cat A. Ask for these to be priced as a separate item, not left in a general allowance.

Statutory and safety obligations. Fit-out works that affect means of escape or controlled services usually need Building Regulations approval. As a business commissioning construction work, you are a “commercial client” under the CDM Regulations 2015, which comes with legal duties. Where more than one contractor is involved you must appoint a principal designer and a principal contractor. Projects lasting more than 30 working days with more than 20 workers on site at the same time, or exceeding 500 person-days, must be notified to the Health and Safety Executive ⁵.

Landlord approvals. Allow for a licence for alterations, the landlord’s surveyor’s fees, and building rules that may restrict noisy work to evenings or weekends.

Reinstatement. Under the RICS Code for leasing business premises, heads of terms should deal with alterations and reinstatement. Agree early whether you must strip out your fit-out at the end of the lease, because this can be a large future liability.

Rising costs. Knight Frank reports that fit-out costs have risen sharply ³. Keep a contingency that matches how developed the design is.

Questions to ask a landlord

• Can we see the Cat A drawings and the mechanical and electrical specification, including the design occupancy and cooling capacity?
• Is anything already installed that we will have to remove? Would you leave it out, or contribute to our costs instead?
• Who pays to adapt the Cat A to our layout?
• What will we have to reinstate at the end of the lease, and can we leave our alterations in place?
• For Cat A+: what can we change, who owns and maintains the furniture and equipment, and what happens to it at the end of the lease?
• Must we use your nominated firms for fire alarm, sprinkler or controls work?

Questions to ask a designer or contractor

• What exactly does the price include: fees, furniture, AV, data cabling, IT hardware, statutory approvals, VAT?
• Which items are provisional sums, and how have they been estimated?
• How are changes to the Cat A priced?
• Who will act as principal designer and principal contractor, and who is responsible for the Building Regulations application?
• Does the programme allow for landlord approvals and items with long lead times?
• What can we reuse from our current office or from the existing fit-out?

Sources

1. Designing Buildings Wiki, Fit out of buildings (Cat A and Cat B definitions and typical scope)
2. Brodies LLP, Plug and play: Cat A+ fit-out (October 2023)
3. Knight Frank, Occupier Fit-Out Cost Guide, Spring 2026
4. Workplace Insight, Commercial property sector should embrace circular economy, say BCO (November 2022)
5. Health and Safety Executive, CDM 2015: commercial clients

Figures were checked against the sources listed in October 2026. Fit-out costs move quickly; treat the rates as a guide and get current prices for your own scheme.

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Illustration: a real photograph of the Michelmores office in Exeter, with the virus added.

Written in March 2020, as the first lockdown began. For where things stand now, read The office is lying to you and How much office space do you need now?

Coronavirus is going to change office design significantly. We are about to undertake a forced large-scale experiment in flexible working, that is going to challenge the very idea that we need an office at all.

For years the way we work has been changing significantly. Not so long ago, most of us had to go into the office just to check our email. But the advent of the smartphone and cloud email meant our physical location was not actually relevant to our ability to work. 4G, networks, super fast broadband, SKYPE, Facetime, whatsapp…. all meant a trip to the office was verging on the inconvenient. It certainly wasn’t much good for the environment or our pockets either. Better to log in at home with the dog at our feet and be productive straight out of the shower, than sit on a train for two hours and pay £60 return.

The last remnants of the office as we knew it still remain. Many accounts departments are still wedded to the server room and the tape backup, but that is disappearing fast into the cloud also. Many offices have already become touchdown hubs, that resemble elaborate coffee shops with wifi and bookable meeting rooms, rather than offices of old. With flexible working, it quickly became apparent that an office could be reduced in size by 40%, why wouldn’t any company want to reduce their second largest cost by that amount anyway? Especially if it was more attractive and productive at the same time?

Flexible working also suited people as well as companies. Flexible hours, working from home, four-day weeks. All of this has become more available to full time staff. Whilst outsourcing and contract work has become rife, keeping the headache of permanent staff off the books only paying people for work that they actually do, when they want to do it.

In fact, the term virtual company has become more common.  A company today can be a network of self-employed experts that rarely meet in person. Coming together for the complex projects, and disbanding quickly and efficiently once the goal has been achieved. It could easily be argued that it produces an even better result. Plus with no fixed cost, no overheads and super-efficient is there a competitive downside?

Companies typically sell products and services. In product sales, take a look at what is happening on the high street. Bricks and Mortar retailers cannot compete with online retailers who operate with much lower overheads, basing themselves anywhere without the huge property and staffing costs of a large high street retailing operation.

But look at the service industry, which makes up a large percentage of the UK’s GDP and also takes up most of the office space. Do they really need large office spaces either? We’re about to find out….

Coronavirus is about to stress test any company that isn’t able to continue to work without an office at all. People will be self-isolating themselves at home, staying away from the commute, avoiding train stations, not flying to conferences, avoiding face-to-face meetings…. essentially the vast majority of staff will be working, virtually, from home.

Once this experiment is over, what are we going to find? Essentially any company with systems in the cloud is going to find out the startling truth, that not much cannot get achieved with staff working from home. People are going to be surprised too, it’s great to work from home for longer periods of time, not just Friday.

The office is essentially a social tool, a place to meet people face to face and collaborate, but this can be done using technology too. Does it matter if a co-worker is as unseen on the floor above as they are many miles away at home? Essentially no, and this puts a spotlight on the enormous cost of office space, and the many miles and hours wasted moving bodies around our cities every day at the cost to our environment.

It’s clear that the implications of flexible or agile working have only been touching on what is about to become a large-scale experiment in flexible working.  Do we really need an office at all? If so, how large does it really have to be? How many days of the week do we actually need it? The answers to these questions could be startling, and we’ll know the answers soon enough. The world of office design is about to change and it will never be quite the same again.

The post Coronavirus changed office design forever appeared first on Business Interiors.

Firstly, when the various fields of interior design (for example, office, home, retail and hotels) cross-fertilise, the offspring can produce questionable results. Office designers, like me, are as susceptible to this problem as anyone else, which is why I seek the advise of my interior designer mother-in-law, Pamela Horton of Cotswolds Inns and Hotels, when it comes to my home, lest I ruin everything by knocking the whole place down and building a glass cube. If you need evidence of the dangers,  watch The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes, and see what the brilliant designer of the ‘Walkie-Talkie’ has built for himself. Unsurprisingly, it looks just like a sleek office, which is surely the worst possible look anyone can come home to, and is probably why it looks like no one actually lives there.

Secondly, bright bold colours have to be handled very delicately in an office. That bright red reception area might seem like a good idea at the time, but within a few weeks some employees have been known to consider slamming their heads down on a sharp pencil, lest they ever see red pantone 032 ever again.

So it’s no surprise then, that I think appointing Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, of “Changing Rooms” fame with a penchant for purple and orange, might prove to be a risk.

If anyone has seen the gleaming glass headquarters of St. James’s Place from the car park of Waitrose in Cirencester then you might imagine that that is what Money.co.uk’s head office probably looks like.  Peering through the glass it isn’t hard to imagine Laurence’s flamboyant style clashing comprehensively with this typical corporate office building.

But when I see the Money.co.uk building I realise nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a castle like the fairy tale ones you see in Disney movies. If there is one building that can withstand a visit from the mad hatter’s tea party, it would be this one. Laurence confidently qualifies the provenance of what I am about to see: “I wanted to have a proper, grown up, intellectual relationship with the building itself and I think this is what the planners enjoyed. You may look at the building and say well that’s a little bit Alice in Wonderland but bizarrely these are actually the right kind of references for the date of the building. Alice Liddell, who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, actually spent a lot of time in South Cerney just down the road, so there are a lot of layers here above and beyond the very fashionable, very invigorating bright colours.”

The front door is reassuringly frameless glass with a sharp company logo, as one might expect, but I can glimpse the trademark purple on the floor, a living wall and a Money.co.uk logo chandelier. This is going to be interesting, perhaps even magical – there’s a hint of the Harry Potter about this building too.

As you walk through the entrance to the reception area it’s clear that Laurence is going to relish the opportunity to jolt the workforce out of office mediocrity, not with random madness but with a clear strategy. “We spent so much time working on what this place felt like when you walked through the door,” says Laurence. “There you are, it’s a really crap Monday morning in January, you’ve got a little bit of a hangover perhaps, it’s raining outside and you’ve got to go to work. What is the first thing that happens to you as you step into the building? Here we’ve created an entirely living environment – we’ve got the vertical planting in the space, there’s bird song, there’s sense, there’s incredibly thoughtfully contrived lighting, to actually make you feel as you come through the door, ‘ah – this is an oasis’. We want the first point of contact for the people who work here to be unbelievably positive and something you actually look forward to,” Laurence informs me.

And I see what he means. I’m not sure it will cure your hangover, but it will certainly distract you. You can see a connection between the angles of the Money.co.uk logo repeated throughout the design the flooring is an infinite ‘M’ zigzag; even the office doors have custom made triangular vision panels to match. Are those birds on the chandelier? No, it’s the logo again; this is an office after all. The recurrent Money.co.uk ‘M’ zigzags through the floor pattern, but I’m starting to see ‘W’s for Wow! And the herringbone also has its finger right on trend. All this fashionable indulgence works well, still managing to stay on course as ‘relevant to the company’ and it had to be purple of course, just in case anyone is any doubt who the designer might be. I do wonder how this would sit in a traditional office building, but in a castle it absolutely works. Who wouldn’t be proud to work here?

I’m going to say it straight out, before I take you deeper inside the rabbit hole – this office is a triumph. Yes, there are some areas that don’t work so well for me, but then some people don’t like marmite, and for them there is also plenty of jam, peanut putter, and marmalade in this office. When I see the subtlety and detail that has gone into some of these rooms, I realise I must have underestimated Laurence Lewellyn-Bowyn; those flamboyant five minute makeovers concealed some serious talent. It’s hard to believe this is his first office. This stands as one of the best offices in the UK; not even Google have a castle.

And it makes business sense too. If this office were in London, CEO Chris Morling tells me, it would cost four to five times more in property costs, and in a matter of years that adds up to millions. Chris clearly feels that that his money is better spent on his employees’ welfare. Additionally, the employees don’t have the painful daily commute in and out of the big smoke either.

“The fact that Chris is here in the Cotswolds with Money.co.uk is an incredible feather in the cap of the Cotswolds,” says Laurence. “The Cotswolds should be all about fudge and teacups but in fact there is an enormous amount of commitment to design and to modernity. We have a huge new wave of food and digital companies moving here and I think what Money.co.uk have done will become a real totem for the resurgence of the Cotwolds.”

The passion for the Cotswolds is clearly shared by Chris who moved to the area 12 years ago, “I made the decision then that I wanted to build a business here, not least because I wanted a short commute and to enjoy the countryside, but also from a business perspective it makes sense – working in London is just so much more expensive.” You have to admit they have a point.

But less about the economics and back to the office: let’s start with the Ice Cave meeting room. What before was a damp, dark back room, probably only good for storing junk, has been transformed into a cosy quiet room that looks supremely practical for private impromptu meetings and quiet working. And it looks cool too (pun intended); the sled table is inspired, and the penguin on a fur rug is just the right side of amusing and pleasantly decorative. The subtle grey and blue colours work extremely well together and are calming, not shouting to distract you from your work. The angular walls add interest and there is an acorn stuck in the roof! Yes, we’ve seen similar in Google somewhere with their unlimited budget but this works just as well. Oh and nothing to see here, just a polar bear…!

Surprisingly the Google reference does not sit well with Laurence, “I said to Chris right from the outset, this isn’t going to be a Jamie’s Italian – a series of rather self-conscious clichés, that’s what I call ‘Google design’, which is all rather down market.” Um…isn’t that brilliant igloo totally Google inspired? “No, I wanted things to be much more evolved,” Laurence continues. By that he means places like the boardroom, which has been named The Bored Room because, I suspect, that is exactly what Laurence feels when he has to sit in one; don’t we all? There is a strong combination of orange and purple here to make sure falling asleep isn’t an option, but closing your eyes occasionally is a necessity. “In the boardroom we’ve got a neon ceiling, which is obviously a very fashionable thing to do, it’s the sort of thing that Tracey Emin is doing a lot of at the moment, and it’s something that’s getting a lot of comment from the denizens of Cirencester as they take their Labradors for a walk in Cirencester Park. But actually it’s Tennyson’s ‘Splendor Falls on Castle Walls’, which I thought was entirely appropriate.” Apparently this piece of poetry was written at about the same time the castle was built. “Tennyson also had a relationship with the Cotswolds. It’s a classical reference put in a contemporary context,” Laurence continues, “but even better, ‘Splendor’ makes an appearance in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, which was also another big inspiration for the project.”

It’s strong stuff. There was a time when management consultants used to recommend having meetings standing up to keep the time spent in them to an absolute minimum. Let’s just say that even though those Interstuhl chairs are fantastically comfortable, Laurence’s clever use of colour in this room should achieve the same result as those management consultants, whilst sitting down. This would no doubt delight Laurence. “Look, you don’t bring in a design brand and have me asking people what shade of beige they want, actually the whole point was to do things that were boundary pushing, exciting, slightly titillating, a little bit naughty, a little bit crazy, a little bit scary, a little bit me!”

I hear what he is saying but then I’m confused by the subtlety of the kitchen, which is my favourite room. The colours are subtle and neutral compared with the other areas; there’s nothing in here to jar or jolt, it’s a real refuge. The colours change just enough to show something is at work here, but never raise the noise above anything other than a great place to hang out. The sofa and stool fabrics pick up the colours on the side of the arcade machine, with the fabrics on the Connection chairs subtly changing to pick up details elsewhere around the room. None of this is necessary to create a good space but we’re being elevated to higher plane here. The fabric of the pool table is new, embedded with the Money.co.uk logo and in a colour that seamlessly blends with the scheme. The copper pipes and industrial lights, along with the exposed ducting, tread just the right amount of industrial without veering too far into the clichés Laurence wants to avoid.

The detailing doesn’t stop there: the green accent colour on the cage light-fitting picks up on the custom colour of the wires on the hanging bulbs, and they match the death ray colour of the UFOs on the arcade machine; the exposed silver pipes; the copper pipe detailing; the copper effect splash-backs; the herringbone parquet flooring that echoes the carpet outside and bounces randomly between the white of the kitchen surfaces and the wood; the work-tops that flow down to the floor; the LED strips under the kitchen units lighting the floor. It really is very good.

My admiration turns to astonishment in the loo, of all places; often the last place to get any love in an office.

The hand dryers have been capped in copper and the whole wall has been elaborately decorated in a maze of copper piping, dials and knobs, turning the mere act of drying your hands into a magical ritual. Practically it’s completely unnecessary, and a waste of time and money in the real world, but it is uplifting to see the mundane so lovingly transformed. The colours sing with the attractive and thoughtful details, balanced in just the right measure.

And the urinals? They get exactly the same treatment. My only surprise is that the urinals themselves are, shock horror, normal. Surely they should have been a monkey holding an ice bucket or some other wonder? It only serves as a reminder that our standard expectations have now shifted considerably up the bell curve.

And there is more: a cinema room; but not like a smaller version of your local Odeon, this is a life-sized starship complete with views of distant galaxies through the ‘windows’ in 3D. Possibly some floor to ceiling digital wallpaper of ‘The Enterprise’ would ordinarily have produced a similar look, but that’s not good enough here, instead we have a fully realised film set.

I’m slightly embarrassed to ask Laurence if anyone has done a ‘post-installation’ survey of the employees, which is the usual process to measure the success of these office refurbishments. “We’re just sitting here in this office and everyone is rolling past with an enormous smile on their face as if we made this place out of catnip. Everyone is rolling around with warmth and pleasure,” Laurence responds. I’ll take that as a yes then! Chris Morling assures me, “Before we began, consulting the team was very much where we started, we discussed with them exactly what they wanted out of the space and we had this information before Laurence came on board, that was very much the driving force behind everything we’ve done. It’s not just about pretty walls and a stunning work environment, which we have; it’s about creating a space that works for the team. Whether that be a room full of whiteboards, or little chill out areas where you can work quietly on your own, or cameras in walls (not to be spied on, but to be able to Skype with colleagues in London); all of these things add up to make a great working environment, which is what we are all about.”

There’s one room that is pure ‘Laurence of my preconceptions’.  I imagine that Laurence couldn’t contain himself anymore, and the Pow Wow room staggers from a full frontal hit of LLB. On one wall is a portrait of the man himself – the ‘Laughing Cavalier’ by Franz Hals has been remodelled with the face of the designer, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Art is the Ape of Nature’. A traditional suit of armour fills the corner, paying homage to the history of the building, but it has been splattered Jackson Pollock style, with multi-coloured fluorescent paint. From his vantage point on the wall it’s as if Laurence has ejaculated on our medieval sensibilities; I have to stop myself from cheering him on!

On the opposite wall a pseudo Liechtenstein literally smashes us in the face: ‘Design’s gonna get you in the end punk’! In the long term, I’m guessing if there is one room that Money.co.uk will quietly reconsider when Laurence has turned his back, it will be this one. I ask Chris if he was involved in some of these off the wall ideas, or did he just give Laurence free rein? “As Laurence has previously said, you don’t bring in a world class designer and tell them what you want,” says Chris; “Superstar,” corrects Laurence mischievously, “superstar, world class designer; get it right mate!” You can tell these two get on very well, and had a lot of fun on this project but there is a serious point here – Chris continues, “You bring someone on board with that talent because you want the benefit of their experience. So the balance was ensuring that the work environment worked for us and that we didn’t have anything in terms of colours and design that were so far off the wall that people would hate it. And it was finding the balance between the flamboyance and creativity, and the fun, different work environment that we wanted.”

That’s an interesting way of putting it. Laurence can’t diss the style of Jamie’s Italian and Google in one breath, then wave through that kitchen and igloo, which I love. But, in my opinion, that only goes to prove that Laurence, Chris  and the money.co.uk project team,  are operating at another level altogether here. This is after all a working office and it never loses site of that fact. There is just the right amount of flamboyance “balanced”, as Chris Morling put it,  so that every indulgence in fact serves an ultimate practical purpose. This office is so astonishingly good, that I can report that this is the most successful cross-fertilisation I have seen. We should never have doubted that Laurence, put out to stud in The Cotswolds, would produce anything other than a thoroughbred winner.

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On Episode 2 Caroline Quentin squeals with delight as she is helicoptered into the home of the architect who designed the “Walkie Talkie” in London. Jay Bargmann of Rafael Vinoly Architects. The Walkie Talkie is a notorious office landmark in London. The  unusually curved office building had to be modified soon after completion, because it was melting cars with reflected focused sunlight. Apart from the unusual curve, it is a fairly standard office building. So seeing how the Architect had designed a home, it seems my theory was about to be put to the test. What will the home look like? Will it be a monument to the office world? Or be an astonishing place I would genuinely like to live in?

Sure enough, it was more office than an office. As the helicopter flew in, we could see an almost perfectly rectangular glass box sitting in the landscape, which looked visibly distressed by this glass block UFO that had fallen out of the sky and embedded itself into the hillside.

No terraces at the front to take in the fresh air and the views, that would spoil the office block lines obviously. You can’t even open the windows, save for a few “postboxes” that frankly spoil the lines of the building – maybe he shouldn’t have bothered at all and gone the whole way? Bizarrely the building had not been built parallel to the view, to maximise the views from the windows, but perpendicular to the landscape, to “focus” the building at one end. So, I assumed that “end” would be the living room to end all living rooms? In fact, it was more airplane terminal than ‘night in with a film”. There were two Vitra Eames Lounge chairs (obviously Eames lounge chairs darling) and ….that’s it, besides three square pouffes to perch on in the window?! Is this set up for a furniture brochure shoot? Too cool for school is an understatement.

The Eames chairs actually had their back to the view, and were pointing in at the building. Presumably the building was far better looking than the view to the designers? Caroline and Piers reclined on the chairs and she tried to understand the point of the building, with Piers pointing out a couple of cables that stopped the whole box falling over.

Caroline struggled to understand what she should like about it, Piers struggled to find the words from Architectural college to sell the concept to her. Caroline said what we were thinking subtly, when she struggled to make a cup of tea. It just doesn’t work as a home.

The stairs were beautifully made, no doubt. But I couldn’t help thinking the money could have been better spent. Some sofas would have been a good start.

Upstairs, Caroline struggled, completely unable to find a kettle, and when she did find it, was unable to see where to plug it in. Things turned comical when Caroline realised there wasn’t a door on the loo, in fact everything was open plan, including the bedrooms.

The ceiling had been left “honestly exposed” a rotating fan added to the industrial impression. It looked like power station turbine of sorts, maybe an aircraft hangar?

And of course the dining table looked just like…you guessed it…a boardroom table.

The overall impression was, someone had spent a lot of money creating a showcase of their best office work, but forgot to make a home along the way. So I stand by my original impression. Don’t, under any circumstances, let an office architect or office interior designer anywhere near your precious home!

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