19/06/2026
We don’t tend to think offices we visit are short on space, more often, they are short on usable space, and here’s what we mean: over time, workplaces often develop areas that quietly stop earning their keep, like a meeting room that is too large for most conversations or a corner that collects storage because no one has quite decided what it should be…
Hands up if this rings true…
None of this tends to happen deliberately; we know it just builds gradually as teams grow and working patterns change, but the original layout is simply left to carry on as it was with all the extra stuff now part of the… furniture? Dare we say that?
When you step back and look at it all properly, the interesting thing to me is how much of a building can end up underused because it is slightly misaligned with how people actually work now. In many of the projects we see at Sygnus, the starting point is generally centred around a lack of clarity on how a space is being used.
Once that point becomes visible, in our experience the decisions tend to follow quite naturally. For example, a large meeting room might become two smaller, more flexible spaces, or a quiet corner might turn into a focused work area rather than storage.
One client recently described it quite simply as “finding space we didn’t realise we had.” I loved that because it captures something we see quite often, where space sometimes just needs to be rethought, but who’s got time to do that, right?
After 30 years in the industry, that is one of the more consistent lessons. Offices rarely fail because they are too small, but they absolutely DO struggle when parts of them are no longer working as intended, and no one has had the opportunity to step back and reassess.
When you do, the solutions are often less dramatic than expected, but more effective than anticipated.
If this sounds true to you, let’s have a chat, reach out to us and let us give you a more workable workplace.
https://bit.ly/433IOkn
