A 14-person accounting practice signs a five-year lease on a 190 m² floor in Parramatta. The director sketches a plan on a Saturday: fourteen desks along the windows, two private offices, a boardroom and a kitchen at the back. It all fits on paper. Then the fit-out builder walks the site. The boardroom wall lands across the only return-air grille, so the room will be stuffy by 3 pm. Both private offices sit on the window line and take most of the daylight from the open floor. The kitchen is at the furthest point from the plumbing riser, which means a pump and a long run of pipework.
None of this is unusual. Small office layouts tend to go wrong in the same few places, and almost all of them can be caught on a floor plan before anyone signs a fit-out contract. This guide covers how to plan one properly, from the first numbers to the test fit.
What an office layout plan actually decides
An office layout plan fixes the things that are expensive to change later: where walls go, where rooms sit, where the kitchen connects to water and waste, and where power and data reach the desks. Furniture can be moved in an afternoon. A wall that cuts an air-conditioning zone or blocks a sprinkler head cannot.
That is why good office layout and design starts with the building, not the mood board. Finishes, colour and furniture come later, and they sit on top of decisions made at this stage.
Start with numbers, not a sketch
Before drawing anything, write down three figures: your headcount today, the headcount you expect in three years, and how many people are in on your busiest day.
Then check them against the floor area. A common starting point for a whole office, including meeting rooms, kitchen and circulation, is around 10–12 m² per person. Tighter offices go lower, and offices with many enclosed rooms go higher. Treat it as a sense check, not a rule.
One number matters for a different reason. The National Construction Code uses 10 m² per person for office areas when working out how many people a floor holds, and that figure feeds into exit and toilet requirements. If your plan puts 30 people into 200 m², you are well past the population the building was assessed for. That doesn’t automatically rule the plan out, but raise it with your certifier early rather than after the furniture order.
Toilets are the other quick check. Safe Work Australia’s Code of Practice on managing the work environment and facilities allows one unisex toilet where there are 10 or fewer workers and no more than two of one sex. Beyond that, the guide is one toilet per 20 men plus a urinal per 25, and one toilet per 15 women. In a multi-tenant building, the shared floor amenities may already cover you, but confirm it with the landlord.
Read the tenancy before you draw
Walk the space with the base-building drawings, if the agent or landlord can provide them, and mark up:
- Windows and which way they face (western glass in a Sydney summer changes where people want to sit)
- Columns, the core (lifts, fire stairs, risers) and the entry door
- Air-conditioning zones and where the thermostats are
- Sprinkler heads, smoke detectors and the ceiling grid
- Existing power and data points, floor boxes or ceiling drops
- The nearest plumbing riser or wet area
Ask for the building’s fit-out guidelines too. Most landlords of multi-tenant buildings approve fit-out drawings before work starts, and many specify ceiling tiles, glazing, signage, and how services connect. Reading them now saves a redesign later.
Zone the floor before placing desks
With the constraints marked, block out zones rather than furniture:
- Arrival – A clear point of entry, even if nobody staffs it. Visitors should know where to stand within two steps of the door.
- Client rooms near the entry – Clients should reach the meeting room without walking past workstations and screens.
- Workstations along the windows – Daylight goes to the people who sit in one place all day.
- Enclosed rooms toward the core – Offices, focus rooms and phone booths sit well against the inner zone, where they don’t block light.
- Kitchen near the plumbing – Every metre from the riser adds cost and can eat into ceiling height.
- Print, storage and comms near the core – These are noisy, untidy or warm, and belong away from desks.
Step 4 is where the trade-offs show up. Directors often want the corner office with the view, and sometimes that is the right call. For a professional practice where clients judge the firm partly on the room they meet in, presentation can matter as much as desk count, as it did in the New South Lawyers fit-out in Parramatta. For most small teams, though, glazed fronts on inner offices, or offices tucked into corners where they block the least glass, are the better compromise.
Zones don’t always need walls. In the SDP Solutions office on Kent Street, client and staff areas were defined through colour, finishes and shapes. In a small tenancy, that kind of visual zoning often does the job of a partition for far less money.
Sizes that matter
| Element | Planning guide | Why it matters |
| Walkways and aisles | At least 600 mm clear | Safe Work Australia’s minimum for safe movement. Treat it as a floor, not a target. |
| Main circulation route | 1,000 mm or more | 1,000 mm is the minimum width of an accessible path of travel under AS 1428.1. |
| Workstation desk | 1,500 × 750 mm to 1,600 × 800 mm | Common sizes. Bigger desks eat a small floor quickly. |
| Space behind a desk | About 1,000 mm, more if it is also a walkway | Room to push a chair back without hitting a cabinet or a colleague. |
| Meeting room for four | Roughly 9–12 m² | A table, four chairs, a screen wall and a door swing. |
| Eating area | 1 m² clear per person eating at once, plus furniture | Safe Work Australia guidance once 10 or more people usually eat at the same time. |
| General lighting | 320 lux for routine office work | The level Safe Work Australia’s code gives for reading, writing and typing. |
Layouts by team size
Under 10 people (roughly 80–120 m²)
Keep it open. One meeting room that doubles as a quiet room for calls is usually more useful than a private office for the director. A kitchenette along one wall is enough. If the tenancy has its own amenities, a single unisex toilet may meet the guidance, depending on your team mix. Resist extra walls: at this size, every enclosed room takes a big share of the floor.
10–25 people (roughly 120–300 m²)
This is where layouts get tight. Plan two meeting rooms of different sizes rather than one large boardroom that sits empty most days, and add one or two focus rooms or phone booths. Once ten or more people regularly eat at the same time, the kitchen bench needs to become a proper break area. Give print and storage a dedicated alcove, or they will spread into the desks within six months.
25–50 people (roughly 250–600 m²)
Teams start to need their own neighbourhoods, and the balance of open and enclosed space becomes a real decision. Our piece on open-plan versus private offices works through that choice. At this size, check the air-conditioning zoning closely, because a floor with only two or three zones will struggle once several enclosed rooms are added. It is also where the occupancy question above is most likely to come up.
The ceiling decides more than the floor plan
This is the part most layout advice skips. In a typical Sydney office tenancy, the cheapest wall runs along the ceiling grid, avoids the sprinkler heads and stays inside one air-conditioning zone.
A wall that splits a zone leaves one side without its thermostat. The meeting room ends up hot while the open floor is cold, or the other way round. Fixing it means new ductwork, extra supply or return air, and sometimes a new zone controller. Full-height walls can also mean moving or adding sprinkler heads and smoke detectors, because each new room needs its own coverage.
So when two layouts look equally good on paper, pick the one that works with the ceiling. Shifting a meeting room 600 mm so it sits under the existing services can save more than any furniture decision you make.
Common mistakes
- Placing desks first and squeezing rooms into whatever is left
- Putting the kitchen in the “quiet corner” furthest from the plumbing
- Glazing every meeting room, then finding nobody can take a confidential call
- Ordering furniture before the layout has been tested with real dimensions
- Forgetting storage, print, a comms cupboard and somewhere for bags and coats
- Assuming no approval is needed. In NSW, internal office fit-outs often go through a complying development certificate from a private certifier, and works outside the code need a development application. Either way, allow time for it.
Test the layout before you sign
A test fit is a quick layout drawn over the real floor plan to check that your brief fits the space. It is worth doing before you sign a lease, because it tells you whether 190 m² really holds your team or whether you need 230 m². It is normally the first design stage, before concepts and documentation, as the stages of a typical design process show. Test it against your busiest day, trace the walk from the entry to the meeting room, and check what a visitor sees first. For a sense of how long the design work takes after that, the design timelines in our FAQ are a useful guide.
Getting the order right
A good small office layout comes from honest numbers, a careful read of the tenancy and a few decisions made in the right order: zones before desks, services before walls, testing before ordering. Get those right, and the lighting, acoustics and finishes covered in our office fit-out essentials guide have something solid to sit on.
If you are weighing up a tenancy, in the city or through our interior design team in Parramatta, Al & Co Haus of Design can run a test fit on the floor plan as part of our commercial interior design work. You can see similar briefs among our recent projects, or send us your floor plan and headcount.