# Pharmaceutical Company Office Design Across Two Floors

> A two-floor office design for a pharmaceutical company. The ground floor takes arrival, meetings and the documentation the business runs on; the upper floor takes the cabins, the workstation blocks and a 40-seat cafeteria. Both floor plans are published here, along with the board room, calling pods, breakout and washroom views.

## The brief

A pharmaceutical company's office across two floors of the same building: arrival,
management, the meeting load, the documentation the business is required to keep, and a
working floor for the people who are there every day.

Two floors is not twice one floor. The question is not how to fill each plate — it is
**which floor each kind of person lands on**, and the answer shapes everything else.

## The split: visitors below, work above

| Ground floor | First floor |
| --- | --- |
| Reception and lounge | Fourteen cabins around the perimeter |
| Board room, 17 seats | Workstation blocks of 24, 12 and 8 |
| Meeting rooms 1 and 2 | Open cabin and a two-person cubicle |
| Cabins and a 33-desk workstation block | Cafeteria for 40, with a pantry |
| Collab area and calling pods | Document room |
| Mandir | Toilets, including an accessible WC |
| Documentation store | |
| IT, server and UPS rooms | |
| Toilets, including an accessible WC | |

Everything an outsider touches is on the ground floor. An auditor or a customer can be
received, seated, met and shown out **without reaching the working floor at all** — which
in a regulated business is a practical requirement, not a courtesy.

The upper floor is then free to be a working floor. Its corridors run at 1500 mm, the
cabins sit around the edge so the middle stays open, and the cafeteria is placed at one
end rather than centrally, so the noise has somewhere to go.

## What a pharma office carries that a generic office does not

**Documentation is a room, not a cupboard.** Regulatory, batch and quality records take
real floor area and need controlled access. This plan gives them a dedicated store on the
ground floor and a document room upstairs, rather than treating storage as leftover space —
which is how paper ends up in a corridor after eighteen months.

**Services rooms are grouped and reachable.** Separate IT, server and UPS rooms sit along
the service wall with corridor access, not through an office. Grouping them keeps cable
routes short and puts the heat and noise on one wall.

**A mandir, placed properly.** It sits near the reception end, off a circulation route
rather than inside a department, so it is used without anyone crossing the open plan.
Planned in, it works; added later, it ends up in whatever room is left.

## The meeting mix, and the pods that protect it

The board room seats 17 under an acoustic ceiling raft. Two meeting rooms and a collab
room handle the working load. Then the detail that makes the rest of it function: **two
enclosed calling pods** beside the breakout.

Without pods, every one-to-one call takes a room built for six. With them, the meeting
rooms stay available for meetings — and a pod is a product you buy and place, not a
construction item, so it is also the cheapest acoustic decision on the floor.

The collab room is deliberately hybrid: a table at one end, a sofa at the other, so a
session can change gear without changing rooms.

Related: [workplace strategy and space planning](/services/interior-fit-out/workplace-strategy-and-space-planning) ·
[workstation density](/glossary/workstation-density) ·
[demountable partitions](/glossary/demountable-partitions)

## The working floor

Three workstation blocks — 24, 12 and 8 desks — with **planter-topped storage between the
rows** instead of screens. Storage that screens does two jobs and reads as furniture rather
than partitioning, and the planting gives the floor its only soft edge.

The graphics are the other move: single words in scale across the yellow walls. On a deep
plate with few windows, that is the cheapest way to give the floor structure and stop it
reading as a warehouse of desks. It also survives a churn of layouts, which a built feature
would not.

Related: [workstations and office furniture](/services/interior-fit-out/workstations-and-office-furniture) ·
[glass partitions and doors](/services/interior-fit-out/glass-partitions-and-doors) ·
[office lighting design](/services/interior-fit-out/office-lighting-design)

## Cafeteria and washrooms

Both are the first things value-engineered and the first things judged. The cafeteria seats
40 with a terracotta feature wall of ceramic plates — **one wall carries the room**, so
everything else stays plain and cleanable. The washrooms take marble, backlit round mirrors
and full-height cubicle doors.

Neither is extravagance. A visitor forms an opinion of a company's standards in its
washroom faster than in its board room, and staff judge an office by where they eat.

Related: [natural stone cladding](/materials/natural-stone-cladding) ·
[vitrified tile](/materials/vitrified-tile) ·
[false ceilings and partitions](/services/interior-fit-out/false-ceilings-and-partitions)

## What to settle before construction drawings

- **Which floor the visitor stops at**, drawn as a route. It drives the whole split.
- **Documentation volume, honestly measured** — in running metres of shelving, not in
  square feet of "storage".
- **Server and UPS load**, and who maintains them out of hours.
- **Cafeteria sitting pattern.** Forty seats is one sitting for some headcounts and three
  for others.
- **Cabin count versus growth.** Fourteen cabins on a floor is a decision that is expensive
  to reverse once services and ceilings are set.

## Taking it to site

We design and build both floors as one contract, including the services coordination:
[office design and build](/services/office-design-build) ·
[turnkey office fit-out](/services/interior-fit-out/turnkey-office-fit-out) ·
[fit-out MEP coordination](/services/interior-fit-out/fit-out-mep-coordination) ·
[corporate offices](/industries/corporate-offices)

**Planning an office over more than one floor?** Send the plates and the headcount.
[Talk to the design team](/contact).

## Frequently asked questions

### How do you split an office across two floors?

By who arrives on each. Here the ground floor takes everything a visitor or auditor touches — reception, lounge, meeting rooms, board room — plus the IT, server and UPS rooms and the documentation store. The upper floor takes the people who work there daily: cabins, three workstation blocks, the pantry and the cafeteria. Nobody visiting for an hour needs to reach the second floor, and nobody working there is interrupted by them.

### Why do calling pods matter in an open-plan office?

Because without them, every one-to-one call occupies a meeting room built for six or more. Two enclosed single-person pods beside the breakout area absorb that traffic, which is what keeps the meeting rooms free for meetings. They are also the cheapest acoustic fix available — a pod is a product, not a construction item.

### Where should a mandir go in an office?

Somewhere reachable without walking through the working floor, and off a circulation route rather than inside a department. In this plan it sits near the reception end of the ground floor, adjacent to the meeting rooms, so it is used without anyone crossing the open plan or knocking on a cabin door.

### How much space do server and UPS rooms need in a corporate office?

More than the IT brief usually asks for, and always with access from a corridor rather than through an office. This layout carries separate IT, server and UPS rooms along the service wall of the ground floor, next to the documentation store. Grouping them keeps cable routes short and puts the noise and heat load on one wall instead of spread across the floor.

### What makes a pharmaceutical company office different from any corporate office?

The documentation. Regulatory, batch and quality records occupy real floor area and need controlled access, so the plan carries dedicated documentation rooms on both floors rather than treating storage as a leftover. Auditor visits also make the ground-floor meeting sequence important: a visitor should reach a room without passing the working floor.

### Can you design and build our office like this?

Yes. Send the floor plate and headcount and we will plan it the same way — a floor-by-floor split, the meeting mix, the services rooms and the amenity level — then build it under one contract.

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Source: https://hagerstone.com/our-designs/pharmaceutical-office-design-two-floors