Blog Post

Compared to designing a large open plan office or a whole office floor, coming up with a design for a meeting room might seem like a fairly straightforward task. You just need a room, with a table and some chairs, right? Well…not exactly. In fact there are a multitude of options and features to consider, all of which could affect how much benefit your organisation gets out of the extra facility.

At Thames, we are experts in designing and fitting out office meeting space for businesses in London and the surrounding area, and can help you think through the different possibilities and achieve a meeting room design which adds real value to your workspace.

Here we run through some of the main issues to think about when deciding how to design and fit out an office meeting room.

1 What will it be used for?

The very first step is to think about what your meeting room is going to be used for, and by whom. Almost all the detailed design decisions you and your office fit out contractor will make, will be determined by this. Being unclear about the purpose of the room is likely to mean that it won’t meet your needs as well as it could, or that its use is limited.

Try to identify all the different types of meetings that you want the room to serve. This will depend on the type of company you are and what activities you need to support. But meeting types could include:

• Presentations
• Client meetings
• Project work
• Project progress meetings
• Team meetings
• One-to-ones
• Appraisals
• Recruitment interviews
• Document reviews / technical reviews
• Training
• Board / Director meetings
• Quiet / chill out area
• Brainstorming / creativity sessions

Once you have a list, it’s time to prioritise. Is there a clear “primary use” which should dominate most of the design decisions? Or is the use likely to be split fairly evenly among a lot of different uses?

When you are clear about the type of meetings you want to accommodate, this will start to tell you how big the room needs to be. A meeting room that is mostly for one-to-ones and small groups obviously doesn’t need to be as big as a meeting room designed to hold company training sessions, large project teams or board meetings.

This exercise may also tell you whether, in fact, you need more than one meeting room. For instance, you may decide that most of the time you need two or three small rooms, rather than one big one – but that your ideal design should allow the space to be opened up to make one large room, via the use of folding partitions perhaps.

2. Where should it be located?

Assuming the room is going to be created within an existing floorplan, where is the best place to site it?

Think about whether it should be close to general office workstations (e.g. to make it easy for staff members to dive into as needed) or well away from them for privacy or to minimise distractions (e.g. for client meetings or HR interviews).

Similarly, think about whether it’s helpful for the meeting room to be closer to facilities such as washrooms, printers etc, or further away. You should also think about the impact on the rest of the office of having people constantly walking through in order to reach the meeting room.

3. How much privacy?

The primary purpose of having a separate meeting room is to provide a degree of separation from the main office. But it’s important to think about exactly how much privacy is really needed.

In particular, you need to decide whether the separation is for the benefit of the people inside the meeting room (so they can talk confidentially) or the people outside it (so they are not distracted by the noise generated by the meeting), or perhaps both.

If you need total privacy for confidentiality reasons (e.g. HR meetings, or client meetings) then you may prefer to use solid, soundproofed partitions to create the walls of the meeting room. However, this can block off natural light to the rest of the main office area. An alternative is to use frosted glass partitioning (as shown in the image above) to allow light through while still obscuring the room from outside eyes.

If you just need to protect the main working area from distracting noise, then clear glass partitions can provide this, while maintaining a light, bright feel to the office overall.

If you sometimes want full privacy but want to maintain as much light as possible, then you can opt for switchable glass partitions, which can be switched between clear and opaque as required. Alternatively, the use of vertical or horizontal blinds also offer flexibility about the degree of light and privacy needed for individual meetings.

4. What layout and furniture are required?

When you know what your meeting room will be used for, you can start to say how the room(s) should be laid out and what items of furniture will be needed. There are nearly as many furniture choices for meeting rooms as there are for the main office area, including:

Tables – Do you want one large table or several small tables? One large table is less flexible but can be visually more impressive and may be appropriate for “board” style meetings or when meeting with important clients. Using smaller tables allows you to reconfigure the room more easily if you need to use the room for presentations and trainings, for instance.

Side tables –Side tables can be placed at the edges of a room to create surfaces for additional resources or for serving refreshments.