Most return-to-office conversations are policy conversations. Three days or four. Badge data. Attendance in performance reviews. Mandates get announced, softened, re-announced, and attendance still lands somewhere short of what leadership hoped for.
The question that gets asked far less often is the more useful one: why would anyone choose to commute for a space that is worse than their kitchen table?
If the office is just a place to answer email under fluorescent light, working from home wins on every measure — noise, comfort, laundry, the two hours you get back. The office only wins when it offers something home can’t: people, energy, materials, a room built for the kind of work you’re doing that day.
The ten offices below all figured that out, some of them decades before “hybrid” was a word anyone used. A few are famous. A few cost a fortune. But every one of them contains at least one decision you can copy at a fraction of the budget — and that’s what each entry ends with.
1. Pixar Animation Studios, Emeryville — the building that forces you to bump into people
Pixar’s headquarters was originally planned as three separate buildings: one for animators, one for computer scientists, one for everyone else. Steve Jobs killed that plan and collapsed it into a single structure organised around a vast central atrium.
Then he went further. The mailboxes went into the atrium. The café went into the atrium. The main restrooms went into the atrium. If you worked at Pixar, you physically could not get through a day without walking through the middle of the building and running into someone from another team.
It was a deliberate bet that the best ideas come from unplanned collisions rather than scheduled meetings — that a two-minute conversation by the coffee machine is worth more than a calendar invite. Ed Catmull has written about how much of Pixar’s cross-pollination traces back to that one architectural decision.
Steal this: You don’t need an atrium. You need a single centre of gravity. Put the good coffee, the printer, and the snacks in one place instead of distributing them politely across every floor. Convenience is the enemy of collision.
2. Bloomberg European HQ, London — the ramp and the pantry
Foster + Partners designed Bloomberg’s London headquarters around a bronze spiral ramp that winds up through the building’s core. There are lifts, but the ramp is the intended route, and it’s designed so that you see and are seen by people on other floors as you move.
Each floor also has a “pantry” — a stocked, generous, deliberately central food and drink area rather than a sad kettle in a corner. It’s a Bloomberg cultural fixture: people go there, they linger, they talk.
Underneath the design theatre sits serious engineering. Petal-shaped ceiling panels combine lighting, heating, cooling and acoustic control in a single element, and the building achieved one of the highest sustainability ratings ever awarded to an office at the time it opened.
Steal this: Make the social route the default route. If your kitchen is tucked behind a fire door at the end of a corridor, nobody is having a chance conversation in it. Move the food to where people already walk.
3. The Edge, Amsterdam — the office that knows who’s coming in
Deloitte’s Amsterdam building was built for a workforce that was never all going to be in at once. There are significantly more employees than there are desks, and no one owns a desk.
Instead, an app reads your calendar and assigns you a workspace suited to what you’re doing that day — a quiet booth for focus, a shared table for collaboration, a standing desk if that’s your preference. It remembers your lighting and temperature settings and carries them to wherever you land. Tens of thousands of sensors track occupancy, so cleaning, catering and climate control respond to where people actually are rather than where the floor plan says they should be.
The result is a smaller building that feels bigger, because almost none of it is sitting empty.
Steal this: Before you design anything, measure how your space is used on a normal Tuesday. Most offices are simultaneously overcrowded (meeting rooms) and half-empty (desks). You probably don’t need more space. You need a different ratio.
4. The Amazon Spheres, Seattle — biophilia taken seriously
Three interlocking glass domes in the middle of downtown Seattle, filled with tens of thousands of plants from cloud forests around the world, kept at conditions that suit the plants rather than the spreadsheets.
What makes the Spheres interesting isn’t the botany — it’s the restraint. There are no conventional conference rooms and no rows of desks. It’s built for reading, thinking, informal conversation and walking. Amazon spent serious money on a space explicitly not optimised for output per square foot.
The research behind biophilic design has been consistent for years: natural light, greenery and outdoor views are associated with better mood, lower reported stress and improved cognitive performance. What’s changed recently is that the business case is strong enough that plants are no longer the first thing cut from the budget.
Steal this: Real plants, maintained by someone whose job it is to maintain them. A dying ficus is worse than no ficus. And prioritise daylight in the layout — the people, not the storage cupboards, should get the windows.
5. Airbnb HQ, San Francisco — the office that tells the company’s story
Airbnb’s meeting rooms are replicas of actual listings from the platform — a Milan apartment, a Bali villa, a mushroom dome in California. Employees were also given latitude to shape their own team areas rather than receiving a finished, untouchable interior.
This works on two levels. It’s an unusually literal expression of the product, so the company’s purpose is visible in the walls. And because the spaces are all different, people move around the building looking for the room that fits their mood — which produces exactly the informal encounters Pixar engineered with its atrium.
Steal this: Kill the identical grey meeting rooms named A, B and C. Give a handful of rooms real character — different furniture, different light, different feel — and let teams have a say in their own zones. Ownership is cheap and it’s the thing people mention when asked why they like being there.
6. Etsy HQ, Brooklyn — an office you can breathe in
Etsy’s Dumbo headquarters was built to one of the most demanding environmental standards in the industry, with materials screened against a list of banned chemicals and near-zero volatile organic compounds. Much of the furniture and fittings were commissioned from sellers on Etsy’s own marketplace, so the building is full of things made by hand rather than ordered from a catalogue.
Air quality, off-gassing and material health rarely make it into design mood boards, but they’re a large part of why some offices leave people with a headache by 4pm and others don’t. Employees can’t usually name the cause. They can absolutely feel the effect.
Steal this: Low-VOC paint, adhesives and furniture cost marginally more and change how a room feels to sit in all day. Add a ventilation check to your fit-out spec. It’s the least glamorous item on this list and possibly the highest-impact one.
7. Zappos HQ, Las Vegas — the office that gave up its own amenities
When Zappos moved into the former Las Vegas City Hall, it broke the tech-campus rulebook. No sprawling on-site cafeteria. No in-house gym. The reasoning, driven by Tony Hsieh, was that a self-contained campus turns employees into residents of a corporate island — so instead, Zappos pushed people out into downtown Las Vegas to eat, exercise and spend, and invested in the neighbourhood itself.
The company talked openly about “collisions” — the number of meaningful interactions per person per hour — as a metric worth designing for, and treated the surrounding streets as part of the workplace.
Steal this: Location does half the work of design. An office near decent food, transit and somewhere to walk at lunch has a real advantage over a better-designed office in a business park. If you can’t move, build relationships with nearby cafés and negotiate a discount — it costs almost nothing and it makes coming in feel like a day out rather than a commute.
8. Microsoft’s Redmond campus — treehouses and outdoor work
Microsoft installed genuine treehouses on its Redmond campus — timber structures built into the canopy, wired with power and wi-fi, usable as meeting spaces. Alongside them sit outdoor “districts”: covered, connected areas designed for working outside rather than just eating lunch outside.
The point isn’t novelty. It’s that a change of physical setting changes how a conversation goes, and that most offices offer exactly one setting repeated a hundred times. A difficult conversation, a one-to-one, a creative session and a status update all happen at the same table under the same light — and all of them suffer for it.
Steal this: Any outdoor space you have — a terrace, a courtyard, a wide balcony — becomes a workspace the moment you add shade, seating and power. And a “walking meeting” policy for one-to-ones costs nothing.
9. Salesforce Ohana Floors — giving away the best view in the building
In most towers, the top floor belongs to the executives. Salesforce inverted that. The highest floors of its towers — the panoramic ones — are Ohana Floors: open to all employees during the day, and available free to nonprofits, schools and community groups in the evenings and at weekends.
The signal is unmistakable. The best space in the building is not a reward for seniority; it’s a shared asset. It’s also a piece of design that quietly answers the question “does this company mean what it says about culture” without anyone having to put it on a poster.
Steal this: Find the best space in your office — the corner with the light, the room with the view — and check who currently has it. If the answer is “a director who’s in twice a month,” you have a cheap and highly visible win available.
10. Google Bay View, Mountain View — everyone gets daylight
Google’s purpose-built Bay View campus sits under a tent-like canopy roof clad in scaled solar panels, and the whole layout follows one rule: no one should be far from a view of the outdoors. Team workspaces sit on an upper level under the daylight-diffusing canopy, with amenities and gathering spaces below, and the floor plates are designed so the outside is never a long walk away.
It’s the largest-scale version of a principle that shows up in every office on this list — that the environmental basics (light, air, acoustics, temperature) do more for how a workday feels than any amount of branded wall vinyl.
Steal this: Before you spend on aesthetics, spend on acoustics. Noise is consistently the top complaint in open-plan offices, and it’s the reason people say they “can’t get anything done here.” Soft surfaces, acoustic panels, phone booths and a couple of genuine quiet rooms will buy you more goodwill than a feature wall.
What the ten have in common
Strip away the budgets and the same five decisions keep appearing:
- They offer variety, not one repeated setting. Focus rooms, social areas, project spaces, quiet corners. People come in because there’s a right room for today’s work.
- They engineer encounters instead of hoping for them. Central pantries, single routes, shared cores. Connection is the main thing home can’t provide, so the good offices treat it as an engineering problem.
- They protect focus as hard as they push collaboration. Open-plan without quiet space is why people stopped coming in. Booths and quiet rooms are not a luxury add-on; they’re what makes the open plan tolerable.
- They get the invisible things right. Air, light, sound, temperature, chairs. Nobody posts these on Instagram and everybody notices them by mid-afternoon.
- They give people some control. Over their desk, their room, their team’s corner. Autonomy is the thing remote work gave employees, and design is one of the few ways an office can give some of it back.
The uncomfortable part
None of this fixes a culture problem. A beautifully designed office attached to a job with no trust, no autonomy and no reason for the team to be in the same room on the same day is just a nicer place to feel the same way.
But the reverse is also true, and it’s the part leaders keep underestimating: you can have a genuinely good culture and still lose people to the sofa, simply because the office is loud, beige, badly lit and offers nothing they can’t get at home.
Design won’t win the argument on its own. It will stop you from losing it by default.
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That’s what we do. Company designs offices around how teams really work: where the focus happens, where the collaboration happens, and where the two are currently colliding. Whether you’re reworking one floor or fitting out a new space entirely, we start with your people, not a catalogue.
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