ZenithSpace Décor

ZenithSpace arrived with a lease renewal, a headcount of sixty-four and a conviction that they needed more floor. A two-week utilization study said otherwise.

What the study found

We logged desk occupancy hourly for ten working days and cross-referenced it with meeting room bookings and actual attendance.

• Peak desk occupancy never exceeded sixty-one percent
• The two large meeting rooms were booked eighty percent of the time and occupied by an average of two and a half people
• Every focus room was booked solid, and there were three of them for sixty-four staff
• Eleven percent of bookings were somebody hiding to make a phone call

The problem was not floor area. It was that the floor was almost entirely one kind of space.

The replan

We cut the desk count to forty-one, converted one large meeting room into four focus rooms, and used the recovered area for a quiet zone with a written norm attached to it.

Partitions to the enclosed rooms run full height to the slab, which costs more than a ceiling-height partition and is the only version that works. Absorbent rafts sit over the open plan at two different heights, which breaks up the flutter from the concrete soffit the client wanted to keep exposed.

They asked for eleven thousand square feet. They needed the nine thousand they already had, arranged so that a person could think in it.

Materials

Exposed concrete soffit, sealed and left. Carpet tile in three tones laid to mark the zones without any signage. Birch ply to every joinery element, left raw and waxed. The furniture is almost entirely refurbished, sourced through a dealer who reupholstered forty task chairs the client already owned.

Outcome

Staff survey scores on the ability to concentrate rose from thirty-one to seventy-four percent within four months. The client renewed on the same floor and put the saved rent into the fit-out, which is how the project paid for itself.

Furniture, almost all secondhand

Forty task chairs the client already owned were stripped, reupholstered and regassed at roughly a fifth of replacement cost, and the desks came from a dealer clearing a floor downtown. Only the focus room furniture was bought new. The saving covered the full-height partitions, which is the trade we would make again every time.