why office pods are everywhere

They may have a reputation as cramped and antisocial but redesigned private office booths are proving an unlikely hit.

Snug, soundproofed, Scandi-designed pods are part of a design shift helping employers make offices more attractive to a broader range of workers. Modular furniture and adaptive architecture — from pods and moveable meeting rooms to whole floor plans built from click-together walls — allow companies more flexibility to balance large open-plan offices with space for private work, and to accommodate hybrid workforces.

“In the past there was a desire to have a universal approach — standards, guidelines, consistency and design for the average person doing the average thing,” says Kay Sargent, at design and architecture consultancy HOK. “That’s not where we are any more. We need to embrace the notion that one size misfits all.” 

Small companies specialising in booths, meeting pods or entire flat-pack rooms have expanded rapidly. Morten Meisner-Jensen, co-founder of modular architecture manufacturer Room, which started in 2018, says the company has grown 300 per cent in revenue over the past four years.

“There was this massive problem that everyone had migrated into open office and they needed peace and quiet to take calls. The phone booth was the solution,” he says. His company’s client list includes Amazon, JPMorgan and Soho House. “There’s been very strong demand.”

The “colossal” growth of this once claustrophobic niche is driven by a unique mix of factors, according to Tim Oldman, chief executive of property consultancy Leesman.

A catalyst was the pandemic. While some employees found working from home meant being distracted by children or chores, others had the opposite revelation: from sheds or studies, they “realised that visual and acoustic privacy was crucial to working more effectively”, says Oldman. When it comes to tasks requiring concentration, he argues the average worker is better equipped at home than in the office.

The same is true for calls. “People had this extreme level of privacy for so long, it created an expectation,” says Anna Squires Levine, chief commercial officer at workspace provider Industrious. “Gone are the days of taking a phone call out in the open.”

In the early days, Levine was unconvinced booths were the answer. “It wasn’t clear whether people would want to sit in a small box to take a call.” But when Industrious, which operates 200 co-working locations in North America, trialled them they were popular. It has since bought nearly 3,000 units.

Designing and making private booths for workplaces, however, has not been simple. When Samu Hällfors started a specialised office furniture business in Finland more than a decade ago, it took him and his team years to finesse the soundproofing and temperature control required for the single-person pods he envisioned. To prevent claustrophobia, the design needed to be carefully thought through. “It’s even more complicated when you realise a small space needs quite a bit of air,” notes the designer.

But the effort gave Hällfors’s company, Framery, a head start as the trend for modular furnishings started to take off. It took the company until 2014 to hit revenues of €1mn; five years later the company reported it had passed €100mn and, by 2023, its annual revenue, with distribution in 74 countries, was about €150mn.

Framery and its competitors benefited from another business shift of the 2010s and 2020s. Boosted by low interest rates and new technologies, the world of tech start-ups grew, demanding more short-term, adaptable workspace to accommodate rapid growth or failure. Co-working spaces made it their business to offer a better working environment than others, offering greater flexibility for more traditional businesses, too, and raising expectations on design.

Real estate group JLL predicts that 30 per cent of office space will be flexible in some form by 2030. “[Employers] would have conventionally moved in and taken a lease of 10-20 years. We’re now taking shorter leases, so there needs to be a more flexible space,” says Gary Helm, founder of London office design studio Obo.

Obo is the UK distributor for OmniRoom: a modular system of aluminium parts clicked together to build rooms of different sizes, manufactured by acoustics specialist Mute. Helm calls this “modular architecture, adaptive architecture”. In the two years to 2023, he says, Mute’s revenue has grown 230 per cent. “If you need to build some walls, it might be only for a few years, and you might need to change them if you need more meeting rooms after two.”

Much of the technology behind modular furniture innovations was originally used in facilities for young people with special educational needs, says Nook director David O’Coimin. The company specialises in “huddle pods” for meetings and solo booths that create more private space in busy offices.

Features such as twinkling lights were developed in sensory rooms, for children with autism who can feel overwhelmed by busy environments. Adjustable lighting used to help people with ADHD and dyslexia has been shown to have a “profound effect on how the brain processes information” in neurotypical people too, says O’Coimin.

Emma Flowers, of Manchester-based interior design company Jolie, notes higher demand for private workspace in sectors such as biotech, something she puts down to workers doing more focused, individual work such as coding.

O’Coimin also says he was inspired by Quiet, Susan Cain’s 2012 book that argues introverts should be taken more seriously, and sees his products as helping both neurodiverse and neurotypical people. “Workspace has forgotten the quiet mind . . . The office is often a theatre stage where you’re always in the spotlight,” he says. “If you design with extreme needs in mind, you end up with solutions that are better for everybody.”

The environmental impact and waste of rebuilding office space make modular systems more environmentally friendly. Conventionally, new occupants might adapt office space by building drywalls, which they then demolish. Adaptive architecture allows them to move in, assemble rooms, switch them around, and take the walls with them when they leave.

Meisner-Jensen believes this is where the “real opportunity lies”. Room’s newer product lines include larger meeting rooms and offices that are delivered flat-pack and clicked together “like Lego blocks” to create new floor plans. “It’s built to be assembled and disassembled many times over partly for those reasons of sustainability.”

Levine at Industrious says these set-ups are still more expensive than traditional architecture. But she believes “it is very clear that the future [of office design] is much more physically flexible”.

Endlessly adaptable office space could ultimately “replace traditional construction”, Meisner-Jensen adds. “You start with a white box and everything in that space is 100 per cent flexible . . . It essentially allows you to have an iterative workspace where you can change things based on what matters most, the people that use it.”