How We Designed a Flexible Office for a Growing Agency

“Flex” is one of the most overused words in workplace design right now. Everyone claims to offer it, but ask five people what it actually means and you’ll get five different answers. At Soul Spaces, we work to a simple definition: a flexible workplace is one where most of the space serves more than one function. That’s the standard we designed to on a recent fit-out for a fast-growing agency, where headcount and team shape were changing faster than the floor plate could keep up with.

Here’s what we used, what worked, and where we’d push back.

Folding walls

We’re not the biggest advocates for folding walls, but they earn their place. The ability to shrink or expand a room on demand can be a genuine game-changer for making the most of a limited footprint. The trade-off is real: these walls can feel clunky, they’re mechanical so they can break, and acoustic performance is rarely as good as a fixed partition. If privacy isn’t the priority and the space-saving upside outweighs that, they’re worth the investment. If your team needs consistent acoustic separation, look elsewhere.

Curtains

Some clients raise an eyebrow when we suggest curtains for an office. They shouldn’t. Used well, curtains are an effective soft divide, letting you close a space down for a 1:1 or a collaboration session, then open it straight back up as part of a hot desk area. They won’t give you full acoustic or visual privacy, but for a lot of the moments an agency actually needs division for, that’s not the point. It’s flexibility without the cost or complexity of a moving wall.

Furniture booths

Booths are having a moment, and for once the hype is deserved. Their biggest value is taking pressure off meeting rooms. Every operator has heard the same complaint: the meeting room is booked out for a call between two people while a five-person meeting has nowhere to go. Booths solve that directly. Their footprint is small, so they’re genuinely space-efficient, and because they’re freestanding, they can be relocated as the team’s needs change. For a growing agency where headcount and team shape shift every few months, that adaptability matters as much as the space they save.

Hot desks

Removing fixed desks changes the entire dynamic of a workplace. People work differently: some want a quiet corner, some want to sit near their team, some want a change of scene through the day, and hot desking lets all of that happen without allocating a fixed desk to every single person. Done properly, it frees up real floor space and makes the office feel more open. It only works if the culture and the booking system support it, but for a business scaling headcount unpredictably, it’s one of the most effective flexibility levers available.

Flip-top tables

Flex often comes at a small cost to how a room looks, and flip-top tables are a good example. What you gain is real versatility: the same room can be reconfigured into a U-shape for a workshop, a lecture-style layout, an auditorium set-up, smaller breakout groupings, or a formal boardroom, all with the same furniture. The compromise is aesthetic, flip-top tables rarely look as considered as a fixed boardroom table, but for a space that needs to earn its keep across very different formats, that trade-off is usually worth making.

What we wouldn’t flex

Not everything should move. The tea point and breakout area is the one space we’d always fix. It’s the heart of the office in the same way the kitchen is the heart of a home, and it needs to comfortably accommodate 30 to 40% of the team at once. Try to make this space multi-purpose, or squeeze it down to save square footage, and you undermine the one part of the office that actually brings people together.

For a growing agency in particular, this space carries weight beyond the square footage it takes up. It’s where new starters get folded into the culture, where informal conversations happen between departments that otherwise wouldn’t cross paths, and where the team actually feels like a team rather than a collection of desks. Every other space in the office can flex to keep pace with growth. This one should stay put and just get the size right from the start.

Getting the balance right

Flexibility isn’t about maximising the number of “flex” features you can fit into a floor plate. It’s about identifying which parts of your office genuinely benefit from doing double duty, and which parts function best when left alone. For a growing agency, that usually means treating meeting space and desk space as flexible, and protecting the social space as fixed. Get that balance right and you build an office that can grow with the team, instead of one that needs redesigning every time it does.