The step people think it is
Most people picture space planning as furniture placed on a CAD drawing. That is the output. The work that produces a good one happens before anything gets drawn.
A plan built without the inputs below will look fine and fail in use. Circulation will be tight in the wrong places, the copy room will be next to the quiet zone, and the conference room will not fit the table it was drawn with.
What the planner needs from you
Headcount today and at the end of the lease. The second number matters more than the first, and it is the one clients most often have not decided.
How people actually work. Days in office per week, meeting load, how much of the work is heads-down. A team on video calls six hours a day needs a different floor than a team that meets twice a week.
Department adjacencies. Which groups need to be near each other and which are better apart. Finance and the sales floor are a common mismatch nobody flags until move-in.
Equipment and storage. Plotters, samples, product, files that legally must stay. These consume floor area and are routinely omitted from early plans.
Anything fixed. Columns, core walls, sprinkler layout, exit paths, ceiling height changes, and the location of existing power and data.
The sequence
Programming comes first. This is the count of what has to fit: seats, rooms, storage, support space. It produces a target area by function before any layout exists.
Blocking follows. Departments and functions get placed as blocks on the floor plate. This tests adjacencies and circulation at a coarse level. This is where most real problems get found, and changing a block costs nothing.
Test fits come next, usually two or three options that trade different things. More workstations against more meeting rooms. Perimeter offices against perimeter daylight for the open floor.
Only then does furniture get specified and drawn, and the plan gets tested against code clearances and the real product dimensions rather than generic blocks.
What a finished plan should include
A furniture plan showing every piece at real dimension. A typicals sheet showing each workstation and office configuration once, in detail. Clearance dimensions at aisles, doors, and accessible routes. Power and data locations against the furniture plan, because that coordination is where fit-outs go wrong.
And a quantity schedule that ties to the quote line by line. If you cannot match the plan to the pricing, one of them will be wrong at install.
Where plans break in practice
Three failures repeat.
The plan was drawn to a headcount that changed and never got revised. Power and data were coordinated to an earlier revision. Or the plan was drawn with generic furniture blocks and the actual product is two inches deeper, which is enough to lose a clearance across a whole row.
All three are version control problems rather than design problems. One party holding the current revision prevents most of them.
How long it takes
A single floor with a clear program is usually a few days for a first test fit and a couple of weeks through to a coordinated plan. Multi-floor or multi-site work takes longer, and the constraint is normally how fast decisions come back rather than drawing time.
We render plans in 3D so people who do not read floor plans can see the space before it is built. That shortens the decision cycle more than any other single thing we do.
What it costs
We provide space planning at no charge when we are supplying the furniture. That is standard practice for dealers, and it is worth knowing so you do not pay separately for something included elsewhere.
It also means the plan and the pricing come from the same place, which removes the coordination gap that appears when they do not.
