Office space planning in Dubai: how much room a team needs

Space planning is the step between the lease and the design. It answers a plain set of questions: how many people sit in the office on a normal day, how many need a door, how often they meet and in what group sizes, who visits, and what has to be stored, cooled or kept secure. Only then does the floor area make sense, because the same area holds very different numbers of people as open desks, as private offices or as a mix. In Dubai the lease state adds a layer: a bare shell, a Cat A unit with its ceiling and air-conditioning in place, or the last tenant's partitions each limit where rooms can go, and our guide to Cat A versus Cat B fit-out explains which parts are yours to plan. When we take on an office fit-out in Dubai, the layout is the first thing we draw.

No fixed figure fits every team, because the figure you read online assumes a desk type, a meeting pattern and a building you do not have. Think instead about how each kind of workspace trades area against privacy.

A good plan reads as a sequence from the lift lobby inward: public, shared, team, private, service.

• Reception and waitingThe first room a visitor sees: a counter, somewhere to sit, a clear route to the meeting rooms and a way for staff to reach the floor without crossing it. The counter is usually joinery, made in our own workshop; our commercial interior design page covers the brand side of that room.
• The open planThe team floor, placed where the daylight is deepest and away from the entrance. Teams that work together sit together, and the loudest team sits furthest from the quietest.
• Focus rooms and phone boothsSmall enclosed rooms for a call, a video meeting or an hour of concentration. They are the pressure valve of an open plan and belong within a few steps of the desks.
• Meeting roomsGrouped near reception so visitors reach them without entering the team floor, with glass fronts to borrow daylight and frosting to seated height for privacy. A room with a screen and a whiteboard needs a solid wall left for them.
• Pantry and coffee cornerNeeds water, drainage, power and extract, so its position is tied to the building's risers. In a Dubai office the pantry doubles as the social room, and a coffee corner set into the wall of the open plan, as visible in the Project Door Step photo, uses less area than a separate kitchen.
• Prayer roomA quiet room away from the pantry and the main circulation, with a place to leave shoes, washing close by and the orientation checked on the plan. It is a standard part of a Dubai office brief and far easier to place at the layout stage.
• Server and comms roomA small lockable room, cooled on its own circuit, where the building's data risers enter the unit and away from any water pipe. Its cooling runs when the office cooling is off, which matters in a Dubai summer.

Comfort is set at the plan stage, and these items are hard to fix once the ceiling is closed.

Once the brief is agreed, the plan moves through a short sequence of drawings and checks.

• The test fitA scaled plan of your actual unit with the desks, rooms and routes drawn in, used to confirm the headcount fits and to compare alternative layouts quickly. It is the simplest drawing in the project and worth having before the lease is signed.
• The 3D modelOnce a layout is chosen it is built in 3D so partners, management or the landlord can walk through it before anything is ordered. Finishes, lighting and joinery are decided in the model rather than on site.
• The stages of the workOur office work runs through a project study, a free site visit to survey the unit and talk through headcount; a plan, with the layout, scope and the building approvals we apply for; a visualisation in 3D; and execution by our in-house team under a dedicated project manager.
• What building management and the authorities checkThe landlord's fit-out guide usually asks for the layout, partition and ceiling details, the cooling and fresh-air changes and the fire and life safety drawings, and may require a no-objection certificate before work starts and an inspection at the end. The authority with jurisdiction over the building reviews the fire and life safety side. We make these applications ourselves; the wider picture is on our commercial fit-out page.
• Joinery made in-houseReception counters, storage walls, pantry units, slatted screens and feature walls are drawn in the 3D model and made in our own workshop, so they fit the plan rather than a catalogue size. See our bespoke joinery page, and our wall panels and cladding page for the feature walls behind a reception.
• What drives the cost of the planThe number of enclosed rooms, because each adds walls or glass, a door, lighting, cooling and often acoustic work; the ceiling approach, whether an existing grid is kept, replaced or the slab exposed; the floor finish and its preparation; the amount of joinery; and how much of the mechanical and electrical system has to change.

Project Design

Silicon Oasis, Dubai · 112 sqm · February 2020 - July 2020

A private office enclosed by a frosted glass partition, with a grey-topped desk, a high-back chair and mesh visitor chairs on grey carpet, in an open-ceiling office in Silicon Oasis with frosted glass partitions, carpeting, flooring and design painting.

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Project Door Step

Silicon Oasis, Dubai · 112 sqm · October 2022 - December 2022

A long meeting table lined with mesh chairs facing a marble-look feature wall, with a glass door to the left and windows to the right, in a Silicon Oasis tower office with workspaces, meeting areas and soundproofing; the slatted walls, partitions and reception counter are our own joinery.

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