Spacez insight · April 2026 · 8 min read
Common Office Design Mistakes Melbourne Businesses Make
This is the single most common and most impactful acoustic mistake in Melbourne office fitouts, and it is shockingly prevalent.
Mistake 1: Meeting Room Walls That Stop at the Ceiling
This is the single most common and most impactful acoustic mistake in Melbourne office fitouts, and it is shockingly prevalent.
A partition wall that stops at the suspended ceiling tile — rather than continuing to the structural slab above — provides almost no acoustic separation. Sound travels over the partition through the plenum (the void above the ceiling tiles) and into adjacent spaces. A meeting room with walls to the ceiling tile is not a private meeting room; it is a lightly screened zone.
The fix: All walls where acoustic performance matters must be built from the structural slab to the structural slab above. This is standard practice in a quality fitout. The cost difference at construction stage is modest. The cost of retrofitting correct slab-to-slab walls after handover is significant.
Watch for it: Ask your builder to confirm in writing that all meeting room and enclosed office walls are slab-to-slab construction.
Mistake 2: Not Enough Phone Booths
The most reliably under-specified element in Melbourne office fitouts. The calculation seems simple — we have 50 desks, we probably need 3 or 4 booths — and it is consistently wrong.
In a modern office, people are on calls constantly: client calls, internal calls, video calls, Teams/Zoom meetings from their desk that they really should not be taking in the open plan. A useful ratio is 1 booth per 8 workstations. An office of 50 workstations should have 6 phone booths minimum — more if the business has high call volume.
The real cost of too few booths: People take calls at their desks in the open plan, which disrupts their neighbours; or they go looking for a meeting room and book them for 15-minute calls, making the meeting rooms unavailable for actual meetings. Both outcomes reduce productivity and create frustration.
The fix: Design phone booths at 1 per 8 workstations as a starting point. If your team is call-heavy (sales, client services, consulting), go to 1 per 6.
Mistake 3: The Kitchen That Is Too Small for Monday Morning
Hybrid work patterns have changed office occupancy — not evenly across the week. Monday through Wednesday sees 70–90% of people in the office; Thursday and Friday sees 30–50%. The kitchen must be designed for peak occupancy, not average occupancy.
We regularly see kitchens designed for a 30-person office that serve 60 people on Monday mornings — not enough benchtop space, not enough coffee machine throughput, not enough seating nearby. The result is a bottleneck that consumes 10–15 minutes of every person's morning.
The fix: Design the kitchen for peak day occupancy, not headcount. Provide at least 1 fully-automatic commercial coffee machine per 25 people present at peak. Ensure there is enough adjacent seating that people are not eating lunch standing at their workstation.
Mistake 4: Designing for the Headcount, Not the Peak
Related to the above but at the level of the whole office. In a hybrid environment, the question is not "how many people work here?" but "how many people are here on the busiest day?"
An office of 60 people with a 3-day hybrid pattern typically peaks at 45–50 people on Mondays and Tuesdays. Designing 45 desks (75% ratio) for 60 people is correct. Designing 60 desks "just in case" is a waste of floor area — floor area that costs rent and fitout cost and ongoing occupancy cost for every year of the lease.
The corollary is also true: designing 30 desks for 60 people because "most people are rarely in" will result in a desk shortage on peak days, which creates real operational problems and signals to staff that the office experience is an afterthought.
The fix: Measure actual peak occupancy before designing. Use the 85th percentile of daily peak as the design target.
Mistake 5: Skipping Acoustic Treatment in the Open Plan
A hard-surfaced open plan — polished concrete floor, plasterboard ceiling, glass partitions on two sides, minimal furniture — is an acoustic nightmare. In Melbourne's contemporary fitout market, the "industrial aesthetic" has led many businesses to strip out carpet and acoustic ceiling tiles in favour of polished concrete and open ceilings. The result is an office where a single loud conversation dominates the room and concentration is impossible.
The real cost: Research consistently shows that noise and interruption are the primary reasons office workers report difficulty concentrating. An acoustically harsh open plan reduces productivity, increases stress, and is one of the most cited reasons people prefer working from home.
The fix: Carpet tile in the workstation zone (not the whole office, but where people need to concentrate); acoustic ceiling treatment (either acoustic tiles in a standard grid or acoustic baffles where a fully open ceiling is aesthetically required); upholstered furniture in the social and collaboration zones; acoustic-rated glass partitions for meeting rooms.
Mistake 6: Polished Concrete Everywhere
Polished concrete is visually compelling. It also reflects sound, is hard underfoot for people standing for long periods, is cold in winter, and is difficult to keep looking its best in a high-traffic commercial environment.
Used well — in the social/café zone, in reception, in corridors — polished concrete is a great material. Used throughout the entire office including the workstation zone, it creates acoustic and comfort problems that cannot be cost-effectively remedied without replacing the floor.
The fix: Use polished concrete (or other hard flooring) in non-workstation areas — social, kitchen, reception, breakout. Use carpet tile in the workstation zone. This is a functional decision, not an aesthetic compromise.
Mistake 7: Meeting Rooms That Cannot Actually Run a Hybrid Meeting
A meeting room with a TV screen and a speakerphone in the middle of the table is not a hybrid meeting room. In a hybrid meeting, some attendees are in the room and others are on video — and if the remote participants cannot see and hear the in-room participants clearly, the meeting experience is degraded and the remote participants disengage.
The failure modes of inadequate meeting room AV:
- Single speakerphone only picks up the person sitting next to it; people at the far end of a 6-person table are inaudible to remote participants
- Camera positioned on top of the TV screen shows only the backs of heads if anyone is sitting to the side
- No acoustic treatment means the room echoes and audio sounds harsh on the call
The fix: For any meeting room used for hybrid meetings (which is all of them in a hybrid office), invest in ceiling microphones, a proper video conferencing camera with tracking, and audio DSP processing. Budget $15,000–$30,000 per room for hybrid-first AV. This is a significant cost — but a meeting room that does not work for hybrid meetings in 2026 is a meeting room that does not work.
Mistake 8: Not Reading the Lease Before Starting Design
The lease defines what is and is not permitted in the fitout. Specific provisions that regularly create problems:
- Make-good obligations: If the lease requires returning the space to its original condition, demountable partitions have significant value over stud walls (which must be demolished at end of lease); if this is not considered at design stage, the tenant pays for both the fitout and the make-good
- Permitted use clause: If the fitout changes the use of the space (e.g., adding a kitchen, creating treatment rooms), confirm the permitted use clause allows this
- Building management requirements: Many Melbourne CBD buildings have specific requirements for approved subcontractors, after-hours work approval, and base building tie-in processes; ignoring these creates compliance and relationship problems
- Landlord fitout contribution: The TIA is typically linked to specific conditions (spent on specific items, invoiced to the landlord, subject to make-good if the tenant breaks the lease early); understand the conditions before designing
The fix: Read the lease before starting design. Have a solicitor review the fitout-relevant provisions. Brief your designer and builder on the key constraints.
Mistake 9: Sizing the Server Room Based on Current Needs Only
IT infrastructure grows. A server room sized for today's needs will be overcrowded within 2–3 years of a 5-year lease. Overcrowded server rooms get hot (risking equipment failure), lose cable management (creating fault-finding nightmares), and eventually require retrofitting additional cooling that costs more than designing the room correctly from the start.
The fix: Size the server room for projected headcount growth plus a 30% contingency. Discuss growth trajectory with your IT team at the brief stage.
Mistake 10: Underestimating Joinery Lead Times
High-quality built-in joinery — reception desks, kitchen cabinetry, storage walls, meeting room joinery — has fabrication lead times of 4–8 weeks once drawings are approved. If the joinery drawings are delayed (usually because the design brief was unclear or changed after design commenced), the entire project programme extends.
The symptom: Fitout is "essentially complete" except for the joinery, and the team moves in to an incomplete office with temporary furniture while waiting for the joinery to arrive.
The fix: Lock the joinery design early. The interior design stage must produce joinery drawings in enough detail for the joinery fabricator to price and schedule. Treat joinery lead time as the critical path item in the programme.
Mistake 11: Inadequate End-of-Trip Facilities
Victoria's cycling infrastructure has expanded significantly, and Melbourne's inner-city office market now sees meaningful cycling commuter rates — often 10–20% of staff in well-connected inner-city offices. A fitout without adequate end-of-trip facilities (secure bike storage, lockers, showers, change rooms) is a real deterrent to cycling commuters.
Beyond cycling, showers serve people who run or go to the gym at lunchtime — a significant and growing segment of Melbourne professional office workers.
Building Code requirements (NCC Section J, Melbourne Council DCP requirements) also mandate end-of-trip facilities for certain building sizes. But the business case goes beyond compliance.
The fix: Include at minimum: secure bike parking (1 space per 10 staff), lockable lockers near the amenity, and a shower per gender (or unisex). In larger offices, scale accordingly.
Mistake 12: Not Getting an Independent Review Before Signing Off
Most fitout clients sign off on the design because it looks good in the renders. Renders are not functional specifications. A render cannot show you that the acoustic wall stops at the ceiling tile, that the phone booth count is too low, that the meeting room AV spec is inadequate, or that the server room is too small.
An independent review — 2–4 hours of a senior designer or consultant reviewing the drawings against the brief — is the most cost-effective quality control step available. At $500–$2,000 for a thorough review, it is cheap insurance against a fitout that fails to deliver on its brief.
The fix: Before approving for construction, commission an independent review of the drawings against the stated brief. Focus the review on acoustic performance, space utilisation, programme-critical items (joinery lead times), and AV specification.
A Note on Budget and Specification
Most of the mistakes above are not caused by budget constraints — they are caused by not knowing what to specify, or by accepting builder recommendations without understanding the implications.
A fitout that avoids all twelve of these mistakes does not necessarily cost more than one that makes them all. The acoustic wall costs the same whether it goes to slab or stops at the ceiling tile; the decision is made at the design stage. Getting it right costs the same as getting it wrong — it just requires more attention.
Spacez designs and builds commercial fitouts across Melbourne. Contact us to discuss your brief or to request an independent review of fitout drawings.