Office workstations

How to plan an office workstation layout

Start with the floor plate, not the furniture. Measure the usable rectangle, then subtract circulation before you count a single desk. The federal accessible-route standard sets 36 inches as the minimum continuous clear width for a walking path, and 60 inches as the width at which two people can pass each other comfortably. Measure that 36 inches from the back of a pulled-out chair, not from the edge of the worksurface, because a chair in use eats most of the difference. Then subtract door swings, columns, and anything that has to stay reachable. What is left is what you can actually fill. The most common planning mistake is buying to headcount and discovering the run does not clear the door to the server closet.

Then decide how much separation the work needs.

Benching seats people along a shared surface, back to back or side by side, with a low spine divider or none. It is the densest option per square foot and the cheapest per seat, and it suits collaborative teams who talk to each other all day. It is the wrong choice for a floor full of people on calls.

Panel workstations put a privacy wall between each person. You get acoustic and visual separation, a surface to pin things to, and a clear sense of whose desk is whose. They cost more per seat and eat more floor. Several of ours face the panels in whiteboard so the divider earns its footprint twice.

Pods cluster three or four people around a shared center, including a 120-degree layout that gives everyone a corner without anyone facing a wall. Pods suit teams that work together in bursts and need their own zone in between.

Storage is the part people underestimate. Options across the line include overhead hutches, wall-mount hutches, full storage walls, bookcase towers, and mobile pedestals that tuck under the surface and roll out as a guest seat. Decide storage per person before you decide the station, because retrofitting a hutch onto a run that was not specified for one is rarely clean.

On power: some stations are built with integrated power and some are not, and it is stated on each product page. Every powered station in this collection is hardwired, which means an electrician on site at install. That is normal for open-plan furniture and it is not a same-day job, so sequence it with your build-out. Unpowered stations ship with grommets and cable management to route cords to an existing floor or wall feed.

Two of the products here are mobile training-table sets rather than fixed stations. They flip and nest on casters, which makes a training room reconfigurable between classroom, U-shape, and clusters without tools.

Stations in this collection run from about $2,699 to $26,999 depending on seat count, panel treatment, and storage. Everything is American-made and custom-built to order at our US factory partner in Dallas and Los Angeles, with a 2 to 4 week build before it ships. Freight to the continental US is free, curbside or dock. For a floor plan, a trade quote, or a phased rollout, get in touch before ordering and we will price the project and confirm lead time.