It’s a question that used to have a clear answer. Open office layouts prioritized collaboration and cost efficiency. Traditional offices prioritized privacy and focus. Pick one, build it, and live with the tradeoffs.
That binary has largely dissolved. The more useful question today isn’t open or traditional — it’s: how does your team actually work, and what does the space need to do to support that? Getting that question right is where office design either earns its investment or misses entirely.
What the Open Office Got Wrong — and Why It Stuck Around
The open office boom was well-intentioned. The idea was collaboration: remove the walls, put people together, let ideas flow. Silicon Valley made it look like the future of work, and the lower build cost made it look like good business sense.
What it actually created, in many cases, was something closer to a sense of homelessness. When nobody has a designated place — no desk to personalize, no corner to settle into — people lose their professional anchor. For employees who come in regularly, having a landing place they can make their own isn’t a luxury. It’s a basic condition for doing good work.
The acoustic problems compounded it. Open offices are loud in ways that are genuinely disruptive to concentrated work — not just mildly distracting, but cognitively costly. Researchers have documented that people in open offices take significantly more sick leave and report higher levels of stress and lower productivity than those with more privacy. The design that was supposed to energize teams was often quietly draining them.
And yet companies kept building them. The price point was real, and the cultural signaling mattered. The traditional office — perimeter offices for senior staff, cubicle fields in the center — had its own problems: isolation, hierarchy on display, natural light hoarded by the people who needed it least.
What Happens When You Rethink the Layout Entirely
When clients come to us having inherited a traditional layout — private offices along the perimeter where the windows are, cubicles filling the center — the first conversation is usually about what’s actually not working. And almost always, the answer has something to do with light, energy, and connection.
The conventional logic says: give the offices the windows. The occupants are there the most, so they should have the best environment. But that logic blocks natural light from reaching the people who make up the majority of the workforce. It puts the most energizing element of the space behind closed doors.
What we do instead is reimagine the interior architecture. Move the private offices toward the interior of the floor plate, where they can benefit from some borrowed light but aren’t blocking the view for everyone else. Open the perimeter to the team. Design neighborhoods and zones — collaborative areas near the windows, focused work areas with acoustic support, gathering zones that feel like they belong rather than like an afterthought.
The Crosby Law Office is a strong example. Law firms tend to default to the traditional perimeter-office model — hierarchy expressed through square footage and window access. What we designed instead was a space that gives the full team access to the energy of the environment while still providing the privacy and acoustic separation that legal work genuinely requires. The result feels fundamentally different — not because we renovated the finishes, but because we changed who has access to what the building already offered.
The Hybrid Reality: Neither, and Both
The open vs. traditional debate has been largely overtaken by a third reality: hybrid work. Most companies today aren’t choosing between open and traditional — they’re designing for a workforce that moves between the office and home, sometimes within the same day.
That shift changes the design brief considerably. The office is no longer the only place work happens. It has to earn its place in people’s weeks by offering something the home environment genuinely can’t: professional energy, meaningful collaboration, access to colleagues and tools, and the kind of separation from domestic distractions that makes serious work feel possible.
The Prestige project pushed this thinking to its fullest extent. The team is largely distributed nationally, so the office needed to serve hot desking, focused solo work, small group collaboration, large presentations, and full-scale client events — sometimes within the same week. The design answer wasn’t a single layout. It was a system of zones and surfaces that shift function without announcing it.
Acoustics matter more, not less. Focus zones matter more. And the variety of environments within a single floor plan matters enormously — because the person who came in for a three-hour focused writing session needs something different than the team that came in for a half-day working session, and both of them need something different than the executive who’s doing back-to-back video calls.
The Real Design Question
What we’re really asking at the start of every office design engagement isn’t “open or traditional.” It’s: what type of work are you doing, and how can we configure this space to prioritize the functionality, productivity, and wellbeing your team actually needs?
That question leads somewhere more interesting than a floor plan decision. It leads to understanding how your team thinks, how they collaborate, what drains them, and what gives them energy. It leads to neighborhoods and zones and ergonomic variety — sit-stand desks alongside soft seating and high tops and quiet booths — rather than a single configuration repeated across the floor.
Our work with IndPro reflects exactly this principle: a space where the culture is visible in the architecture, where people can flow naturally through their day, and where the environment actively supports them rather than being something they work around.
Here’s a design principle worth holding onto: if you want your team to think outside the box, don’t put them in one. The office layout is either a tool that supports free thinking and nuanced approaches to daily work — or it’s an environment people endure. The difference is almost always intentional design.
Office Layout Design in Minneapolis — Where to Begin
Every office layout project we take on starts with a Spark session — the first phase of our Signature Design Process™. Before anything is drawn, we’re understanding how your team works today: where the friction is, what’s working, what’s being worked around. The layout that comes out of that conversation is specific to your people and your culture — not a template applied to your square footage.
The Vision and Blueprint™ phases translate that understanding into a complete spatial design. By the time you receive your Catalyst Capsule™, you hold a full picture of the space — zones, finishes, lighting strategy, acoustic plan — before a single wall moves. And the Reveal phase closes the loop: measuring what changed against the outcomes you defined on day one.
Based in Minneapolis–St. Paul, we work with clients locally and nationally — on-site, virtually, or through a combination of both, depending on what your project calls for.
Start With a Conversation
The best office layouts don’t come from picking a style. They come from understanding your team, your work, and what the space needs to do for both. That’s the conversation the Catalyst Capsule™ is built around — and it’s the right place to start whether you’re refreshing an existing office or building from a blank floor plate.
PureAlchemy Design is a commercial interior design firm specializing in branded environments for office, retail, healthcare, and hospitality spaces. Based in Minneapolis–St. Paul, we work with clients locally and nationally — on-site, virtually, or through a combination of both, depending on what your project calls for. Explore our work.