How to plan an office layout

Count the people and the work they do

An office plan starts with a headcount and a task list, not with a floor area. Write down how many people work there now, how many you need in a year, and what each of them does all day. A team that spends half its time on calls needs different space from a team that works quietly, even at the same headcount.

Next, list the spaces the work needs, not the spaces you imagine. Shared desks, a meeting room for four, somewhere for a call with a client, a kitchen, somewhere to store a bike, somewhere to print. Each of those is a room on the plan, and each one has a size you can check afterwards.

Add the constraints that come from the building rather than the team: a windowless core, a stairwell, a column grid, a landlord's fixed kitchen. Draw what you cannot change first, because a plan that fights the shell will fail no matter how good the room program is.

• Headcount today, headcount in a year, and how each person spends the day
• List the spaces the work needs before you draw any walls
• Note the fixed parts of the building: core, columns, services
• Give every space a size you can check against the area label

Choose a structure: open plan, cells or a mix

There are three honest structures. An open floor gives the most desks per square meter and the most collaboration, and it costs the most in noise. Cells give the most focus and take the most wall. A mix, with a band of open desks and a ring of small rooms along the outside, is usually the answer for a team that does both.

The office templates cover all three, so you can see the difference in numbers. The open-plan office is a single floor with a meeting corner and booths for quiet work. The private office is one person with a desk wall and a window seat. The coworking space mixes hot desks, private offices and a shared kitchen.

Open the gallery, search by tag or filter to the office category, and place the one that resembles your situation. It becomes an editable plan immediately, every room and dimension open for change, so you can measure two structures instead of arguing about them.

• Open plan buys density and noise; cells buy focus and wall
• Compare the open-plan office and the private office templates
• Place the template, then edit it as a normal plan
• Decide the mix of desks, rooms and support space in writing

Note: The template tour covers all 70 starting points and what each one is good for.

Push the noisy rooms to the edge

Noise travels through walls and along corridors, so where a room sits matters more than how much space it takes. Meeting rooms, call booths, print areas and kitchens belong on an outside wall or next to a corridor, and the quiet end of the floor should be furthest from the entrance.

The plan can show this even without sound modelling, because the plan shows which rooms share a wall. Draw the meeting room against the wall of a corridor rather than against the wall of a desk bay, and the difference is visible on the drawing before anybody moves in.

Mark noisy rooms as you place them by giving each one the right Type. The list includes office, meeting, reception, circulation, open plan, studio, workshop, service area and storage, and the type groups the room in the CSV schedule you hand over with the plan.

• Meeting rooms and call booths go on an outside wall or by a corridor
• Keep the quietest work furthest from the entrance and the stairwell
• Check which rooms share a wall in the drawing, not in your memory
• Set the Type on noisy rooms so the schedule groups them correctly

Give every desk a wall, a window or a view

People complain about offices for a few reasons, and the first two are about the desk rather than the building. A desk with no wall and no window gets a screen and no daylight, and a desk facing a wall gets a screen and nothing else. The plan helps you place the desks that avoid both.

Work out how many desks fit against the outside walls and how many sit in the middle. If the middle outnumbers the wall positions by a wide margin, the plan is honest about a problem, and you can decide whether to fix it with windows, partitions or fewer people.

Windows are placed on the edge of a room with the Window tool, which means daylight belongs to the rooms along the outside wall. Put the shared desks and the breakout areas there, and put the storage and print runs along the internal corridor where nobody sits.

• Count the desks against outside walls before you count desks
• Give every desk a wall behind it, a window beside it, or both
• Put shared desks and breakout areas on the daylight side
• Keep print and storage runs on the internal corridor

Note: The plan records where a window sits. It does not calculate daylight, sound or the view through the glass.

Plan the rooms that support the work

Support rooms are where office plans go wrong, because they get whatever space is left over. A meeting room too small for the people booked into it fails every time, and a kitchen a meter long produces a queue that blocks the corridor.

Size each support room from the activity, then type the number into the inspector. A six-person meeting room needs more floor area than a four-person one, a small kitchen needs room for a fridge, a sink and two people to pass, and a call booth must be deep enough to stand in without touching the door.

Give these rooms a name and a type as well, because they are the ones people look for. A plan with a reception, a meeting room, a focus room and a clearly named kitchen tells a visitor what this place is before anyone shows them.

• Size every meeting room for the number of people you book into it
• Give the kitchen room for a fridge, a sink and two people passing
• Check a call booth is deep enough to stand in with the door open
• Name the support rooms so visitors can find them on the plan

Test the layout before you sign anything

Export the room schedule as CSV and read the areas as a list. The file gives every room a name, a type, a width, a depth and an area in the unit system you chose, plus a total. It shows at once that the two meeting rooms you drew are twice the size of the kitchen.

Then test the plan as a route. Walk from the entrance to the furthest desk, the meeting room and the kitchen, and check that a visitor finds all three without asking. The complete Canvasola guide covers workspace tabs and version history, so a second layout can sit beside the first.

Finally, be honest about what the drawing does not tell you. There is no occupancy calculation and no cost estimation in the builder, so the plan shows shape, size and adjacency, and the rent and the legal fit-out need doing elsewhere.

• Export the CSV room schedule and read the areas as a list
• Check the total against the floor area you actually have
• Walk the visitor route from the entrance to every room
• Keep the rejected layout in a second tab for comparison

Note: A plan here is a planning aid with typical dimensions. It is not a lease drawing and not a code-compliant document, so a landlord and an architect still need to see the real space.

A checklist you can reuse

• Headcount and task list written down before drawing
• The structure is chosen on purpose: open plan, cells or a mix
• Noisy rooms sit on outside walls or beside a corridor
• Desk positions against outside walls were counted first
• Meeting rooms are sized for the number of people booked in
• Every room has a name, a type and a size in millimeters
• The CSV room schedule was read before the plan was shown

Common mistakes to avoid

• Fitting desks into the leftover space. Support rooms are what a plan squeezes last, and they are what people notice first. Size the meeting room and the kitchen from the activity, then fill the rest with desks.
• Planning every desk against a wall. Walls are finite. Count how many desk positions fit along the outside walls and be honest about how many sit in the middle.
• Ignoring the entrance route. A plan that is fine on paper can still be confusing to walk. Follow the route from the door to every room and see where you hesitate.
• Leaving support rooms unnamed. An unlabeled rectangle tells a visitor nothing. Name the reception, the meeting room and the kitchen so the plan can be shown to somebody outside the team.
• Reading the plan as a cost plan. The builder has no cost estimation and no occupancy check. It tells you shape, size and adjacency, and nothing about rent or headcount capacity.

Frequently asked questions

How many desks can an office plan show?

As many as you draw, up to 2,000 rooms on one level. In practice the limit is what people can read: a plan with a hundred desk positions needs room labels and clear circulation to be useful to anyone who has not seen the office.

Can I compare two office layouts in the same file?

Keep each option in its own workspace tab and switch between them, then export the CSV room schedule from each and compare the two lists. The version history also keeps 20 snapshots of the document, so an earlier layout is never lost.

Does the builder work out how many people fit in a room?

No. It calculates the area of every room from its rectangle and shows that figure, but there is no occupancy rule, no desk-per-area calculation and no cost estimate. Those numbers come from your own policy or from a landlord's fit-out drawing.

Can I show an office plan to a landlord?

Yes, and the room schedule is usually the more useful of the two files. Export the CSV for the spreadsheet conversation and the PNG or SVG for the drawing, and remember that the plan is a planning aid with typical dimensions rather than a measured survey.

This guide is part of the floor plan guides collection. For the wider product tour, read the complete Canvasola guide, and keep the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet open while you work.