Selby Court

Open plan is usually sold to law firms as a culture change and resisted as a confidentiality problem. The resistance is correct. A solicitor cannot take a call about a client's divorce at a bench desk.

We did not try to argue the practice out of that.

Counting the conversations

Instead we spent three weeks logging what actually happened: how many calls, of what length, requiring what degree of privacy, at what times of day.

The peak demand for genuinely private space was fourteen simultaneous conversations, against a staff of ninety-six. The firm's existing accommodation had sixty-one cellular offices, most of them empty most of the time.

Fourteen rooms, properly built

So the scheme has fourteen enclosed rooms, and every one of them is built to a real acoustic standard — full-height partitions to slab, isolated head detail, acoustic doors with drop seals, and no shared ceiling void.

That is expensive per room. It is far cheaper than sixty-one rooms built to the usual specification, which is to say built to look private rather than to be private.

A room that is nearly soundproof is worse than no room at all, because people will use it as though it were.

The rest of the floor

Everything else is open, and quiet, because the conversations that needed to leave have left. Acoustic treatment is concentrated in the ceiling raft over the central circulation, where most incidental talking happens.

Two years on, the firm's own occupancy monitoring shows the enclosed rooms running at around eighty per cent through the working day, which is close to the number we predicted and considerably higher than anyone was comfortable with at design stage.