What information should a client give the designer before the first layout?

The most common reason a first office layout misses the mark isn't a bad designer. It's an incomplete brief. When a design team is handed a headcount number and a floor plate and asked to "lay it out," they will produce something reasonable-looking and generic, because that's all the information allows. Everything specific to how your company actually works gets filled in with assumptions, and assumptions are exactly what get redrawn two rounds later, once someone in the room finally says what they actually meant.

None of the information below requires a consultant to prepare. Most of it exists somewhere in HR, finance or an operations spreadsheet already. Bringing it to the first meeting, rather than answering it question by question over several weeks, is what turns a first layout from a guess into a working draft.

Headcount, and how many of those people are actually in on a given day

Total headcount is the number everyone starts with, and it's the least useful one on its own. What a layout actually needs is how many people are typically in the office on a normal day, and on the busiest day of a normal week — the gap between those two numbers, in a hybrid environment, is often 30 to 40 percent. A separate article on sizing an office around attendance rather than headcount goes into this in more depth, but at the brief stage, even a rough estimate from swipe-card or badge data is more useful than a precise headcount figure with no attendance context attached.

Departments, and who needs to sit near whom

A layout has to decide where each team sits relative to every other team, and that decision is much easier with a simple list: which departments exist, roughly how many people are in each, and which pairs of teams work together closely enough that being on opposite sides of the floor would actually slow work down. This doesn't need to be a formal adjacency matrix. A short list — "sales and customer success need to be near each other, finance can sit anywhere, engineering wants a quiet zone away from the sales floor" — already removes most of the guesswork.

Growth plan over the lease term

A floor planned for today's headcount with no allowance for growth gets uncomfortable within a year for most growing companies, and a floor planned with too much slack wastes rent for years. What actually helps is a number: how many additional seats the company expects to need by the end of the lease, even as a rough range, and whether that growth is expected to be gradual or to arrive in one or two large hiring pushes. A design team can plan flexible zones around a number. It cannot plan around "we might grow."

Meeting and collaboration needs, in real numbers

"We need meeting rooms" doesn't size anything. What does is a rough sense of how many small two-to-four-person huddle spaces, mid-size six-to-eight-person rooms, and larger boardrooms the company expects to need at once, and whether there's a specific requirement such as a town-hall space for all-hands meetings or a client-facing room that needs to look a certain way. If the company already runs a current office, a week of simply noting how often meeting rooms are booked and turned away is often the single most useful piece of data a client can bring to a first design conversation.

Non-negotiables and constraints

Every company has a handful of requirements that aren't up for discussion, and it's far cheaper to say so on day one than to discover them during design development. Common examples: a server or network room with specific cooling needs, a security-controlled zone for a specific team, a leadership requirement for private offices or the opposite requirement that leadership must sit on the open floor, and any brand-level expectations for how the space should feel — which is its own decision worth making deliberately rather than leaving to the finish schedule at the end.

Timeline and the real move-in date

A design team plans differently around a hard deadline — a lease ending, a business unit relocating on a fixed date — than around a soft one. Share the real constraint, including any dependency the client doesn't control, such as a landlord approval timeline or an existing lease notice period, so the design and construction schedule is built around the actual constraint rather than a placeholder.

Existing furniture, equipment and anything you're keeping

Most moves aren't a clean slate. If specific desks, storage units, meeting tables or server racks are being carried over from a current office, say so at the brief stage, with rough dimensions if possible. This changes the layout in two ways: those pieces need to be planned into the new floor rather than assumed away, and the budget for new furniture shrinks by whatever's being reused, which affects the numbers a design team quotes. The opposite mistake is just as common — a client assumes existing furniture obviously won't be reused and never mentions it, only for it to surface mid-project as "we were actually planning to bring the boardroom table."

Technology and AV requirements

Video-conferencing standards, the number of rooms that need built-in displays and audio, any requirement for a broadcast-quality town-hall setup, and specific IT infrastructure needs — a dedicated server room, particular network cabling standards, or biometric access control — all affect both the layout and the MEP design, and are far cheaper to plan for from day one than to retrofit into a floor that wasn't built with the cable pathways or power capacity for them. Even a rough list of "which rooms need a screen and proper conferencing audio" is enough for a design team to start planning power and data points correctly.

Operational quirks specific to how your company actually works

Shift patterns that mean the office is never fully empty, a security requirement that only certain badges can access certain floors or zones, an accessibility requirement for a specific team member, a need for a mother's room or a prayer room, or a client-facing team that receives visitors far more often than the rest of the company — these are all the kind of detail that never appears on a generic brief template but that meaningfully changes a layout once known. If something about how your company runs day to day is unusual compared with a typical office, it's worth saying so explicitly rather than assuming a design team will infer it.

A budget range, even a rough one

Clients are often reluctant to share a budget before seeing a design, worried it will become a ceiling rather than a target. In practice, the opposite happens more often: without a budget range, a first design can land well outside what's actually workable, costing a full redesign cycle to correct. A tier — basic, mid-spec or premium, in line with published cost benchmarks for your city — or a number from the fit-out cost calculator on this site is enough to keep the first layout inside a realistic envelope.

Who should actually be in the first meeting

The single biggest time-saver at this stage is having the right people in the room, rather than one person relaying answers second-hand from colleagues afterward. That usually means whoever owns the real estate or facilities decision, someone with visibility into actual headcount and attendance data, and, where relevant, a representative from IT or operations if there are specific technical or security requirements. A first meeting with the wrong people in the room tends to produce a list of "I'll need to check and get back to you," which turns a single productive conversation into three or four shorter ones spread over weeks.

What a client doesn't need to bring

It's worth being equally clear about what isn't the client's job at this stage. Structural assessments, MEP capacity checks, fire code compliance and building management system compatibility are the design and build team's responsibility to investigate on site, not something a client needs to research beforehand. Bringing an opinion on furniture brands or exact material finishes this early is also premature — those decisions are easier to make well once the layout and the brand direction are settled, not before.

Common questions

What if we don't have attendance data yet?

A reasonable estimate is fine at the brief stage. Most hybrid companies can estimate typical daily attendance as a percentage of headcount within a plausible range, even without formal swipe-card analysis, and a design team can refine the number once real data is available.

Do we need architectural drawings of the space before the first meeting?

No. A design and build partner will typically obtain or request the base building drawings directly from the landlord or building management, and will conduct their own site measurement and technical assessment as part of the process.

Is it a problem if we don't have all of this ready at once?

No — most clients arrive with some of this clear and some of it vague, and a good first meeting is as much about working through the gaps together as it is about collecting a finished brief. The goal of this list is to know what questions are coming, not to have every answer perfectly polished before the conversation starts.

How much of this changes once the design starts?

Some of it will, and that's expected — a first layout is a working draft, not a final answer. The point of bringing this information up front is to make sure the first draft is close enough that revisions are refinements, not a redraw from scratch.

The clearer this information is at the first meeting, the fewer rounds it takes to get to a layout everyone is happy with. If you're getting ready to brief a design and build partner, tell us about your project and we'll walk through exactly this list together.