For most of the twentieth century, the workplace brief was essentially logistical. How many people, how many desks, how many meeting rooms. The answers produced environments that were functional in the narrowest sense — spaces that allowed work to happen without actively preventing it.

That brief is now, largely, obsolete.

The clients who come to us now are not trying to accommodate a headcount. They are trying to answer a question that would have seemed strange ten years ago: why would anyone choose to be here, when they could work from home just as effectively?

It is a genuinely difficult question. And the answer is not, we have found, a better coffee machine or a more interesting sofa. It is something more structural than that.

The workplaces that draw people in are the ones that offer something the home cannot — not in terms of equipment or technology, but in terms of experience. The particular quality of concentration that comes from working alongside other people who are also concentrating. The accidental conversation that only happens when two people occupy the same physical space at the same moment. The sense, difficult to name and impossible to manufacture, that something is being made here, collectively, that could not be made alone.

Our job is to design for those conditions. To create environments where the accidental becomes more likely, where concentration is supported rather than merely permitted, where the room itself communicates that the work happening inside it matters.

That is a spatial problem. It has a spatial answer. But it begins with a question that most workplace briefs don't ask: not how many desks, but what kind of place do you want this to be?