Most clients arrive with a version of the same sentence: “We want an open office.” And we always ask the same thing back — tell us what your day actually looks like.
Not the org chart. The day.
That conversation is where the design starts. Once we know how a real Tuesday goes — the heads-down hours, the surprise client call, the shared lunch, the late-afternoon brainstorm — the question of “open or closed” tends to dissolve. It’s the wrong question. The right one is what the people in this space actually need from it, hour by hour. That’s the work we do across office workspaces of every kind, in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area and virtually for clients across the country.
Here’s the thing about most open office posts on the internet: they argue for or against open offices using studies that have nothing to do with your team. That isn’t how we work. We design for who you are and how your day moves. Sometimes that lands on open. Sometimes it doesn’t. The point is that “open” is never the answer until we know what it’s the answer to.
The Right Question Isn’t Open or Closed
Most designers default to typology. We design to functionality.
That sounds like a small distinction. It isn’t. Typology asks, “What kind of office is this — open, closed, hybrid?” Functionality asks, “What does a full day need to be possible in this space?” The first question gets you a layout. The second one gets you an office that earns its keep.
In our work, we rarely meet a company whose day fits cleanly into one mode. People focus, then collaborate, then hop on a video call, then pull a chair up to a colleague’s desk, then need ten quiet minutes before a client meeting. A good office lets all of that happen without anyone having to leave the room. A poorly designed open office forces the focused work somewhere else. A poorly designed closed office cuts off everything spontaneous.
The right answer is rarely “open” or “closed.” The right answer is “the space holds every mode this team actually moves through.”
That’s the diagnostic. Before we draw a wall, we want to know how different members of the company operate today — what improves their output, their creativity, their wellbeing. The answer is rarely uniform across a team. And that’s the point. The office should fit the spread of how people work, not the average of it.
A Project Where Open Was the Right Answer
Take Prestige Global Meeting Source. pany at its core, housing clients, entertaining, collaborating constantly. By the time we started, the team had outgrown the layout, virtual employees were ready for a reason to come in, and the brand was ready to live more fully in the space.
Open was the right answer for Prestige. Not because open was trendy or efficient or cheaper per square foot. Open was right because Prestige’s day genuinely needed every configuration to coexist — and an open framework was the only way to give them all of it without cutting the floor into pieces that wouldn’t talk to each other.
We designed two layers into one space.
Layer One: The Day Work Environment
Private offices for the people who needed them. Hoteling stations for team members who come in some days and not others. Quiet booths for focused calls. High tops for casual meetings. Comfortable seating zones that don’t look or feel like a conference room. Every configuration that suits a different kind of meeting or a different kind of work — built into one floor plate, with the kind of circulation that lets people move between modes without breaking concentration.
The reception area earned its keep three times over. The team needed a polished arrival experience without dedicated front-desk staff, so we designed a large reception bar with a backlit logo that does triple duty: check-in point by morning, dynamic hot desk during the day, bar or buffet when clients come through for events.
Layer Two: The Event Arena
Prestige doesn’t just work in this space. They host hoteliers and clients here, and they create experiences in the space — the kind of experience their brand is built on delivering. That only works in a configuration where the work environment can shift, in the same building, into a hospitality environment. The unique configuration we established is the only thing that makes both possible.
The executive meeting area sets the bar: a glass-walled conference room that puts the building’s original brick on display, a custom executive table, blackout shades, and a branded virtual-meeting backdrop that matches the caliber of the clients Prestige is growing into. Just outside the boardroom, a cozy lounge with a water vapor fireplace softens the transition between formal meetings and casual conversation.
Branding a Historic Building Without Overpowering It
The building had real character before we touched it — exposed brick, reclaimed glass panels, a story worth telling. We leaned into the character rather than covering it over. Repurposed glass panels became office front windows. Framed historic photographs found work niches. The new conference room was designed to be largely transparent, putting the original brick walls on display rather than competing with them.
Then the brand layered in: backlit monograms, neon decals, large-format art prints in the company’s brand blue. And — because we asked the question a standard intake can’t answer — reclaimed barn wood from the owners’ South Dakota farm woven into the space. A material choice that rare lets the company tell its story to the environment in a way no spec sheet ever could.
The Outcome
The office went from a space people worked in to a place people want to be. Virtual team members come in by choice now. Clients and salespeople visit not because they have to, but because the space itself makes an impression. Prestige creates experiences for their clients — and now their own office proves it. The project earned an ASID Minnesota award for Commercial Office, and was featured in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal Cool Offices and Artful Living Magazine.
Worth saying plainly: that outcome wasn’t possible in a closed-office plan. It also wasn’t possible in a generic open one. It was possible because we designed open as the answer to a specific question — what does this company’s day need every hour, and how do we give them all of it in a single space?
When Open Is the Right Call (and When It Isn’t)
Open isn’t always the answer. We’ve built closed-office plans where everyone needed their own door. We’ve built hybrid floor plates with closed offices and cubicles for teams whose work demanded both privacy and proximity. We don’t have a house style of “open.” We have a house question — what does your day actually look like — and the answer drives the layout.
When open is right, it tends to be right for one of a few reasons. The team’s day moves through too many modes for any single configuration. The brand wants to feel transparent and current to the people who walk in. Or the space has to serve more than one purpose — work and hosting, focus and gathering, internal and client-facing — and a flexible open framework is the only way to keep all of it alive.
A few projects from our work where open was the right call for the team:
Crosby Law is an open law office that gets the law-office authority right while staying warm, personal, and clearly Crosby’s. Different problem from Prestige, same diagnostic move — open as the answer to a question about how the firm wanted to feel and work.
ModernWell Wayzata is an open coworking space designed around how women actually work — focus, connection, creativity, community. The open framework is the answer to a question about who gathers there and what they need from each other.
Tamar Fink Financial Advisors is an open financial advisory office with workstations inside the open area — a layout that balances authority and approachability without putting clients on one side of a wall.
Morrissey Hospitality is a hospitality firm whose open office welcomes employees and visitors the way the brand welcomes guests, with biophilic plant walls and a real sense of arrival.
Different industries. Different days. Open as the right answer for each of them, for different reasons. Never as a default.
What’s Missing in Most Office Design
Here’s the part of this work that doesn’t scale into a checklist. Most designers understand that an office should hold different kinds of scenarios — focus zones, collaboration zones, a few lounges, maybe a hot desk or two. What’s missing in the field is the personal layer. The part where the design ties to who this client actually is. It’s easy to deliver a hybrid layout: a number of these, a number of those, call it a day. That’s a layout. It isn’t an office.
What changes the outcome is going one level deeper. Understanding the psychology of the brand. Knowing what motivates the people who work there, how they do their best work, what their preferences are — and then designing so the day they want to have is the day they get to have. That’s the part of the work that doesn’t scale into a checklist.
It’s a personal endeavor in a boutique approach where we connect with who the client really is, what they want their space to do, and then push past that to help them realize a higher level of performance — and a real sense of gratification — for themselves, their team, and the people who walk in. Same thinking we bring to every project, whether the answer is open, closed, or somewhere between.
What Are You Imagining for Your Space?
If you’re picturing a workplace that has to be more than one thing — focused and collaborative, working and hosting, brand-aligned and human — we’d love to hear what you’re seeing.
The Catalyst Capsule™ is the focused way in. It’s a short, structured engagement built to clarify what your space actually needs to do, where the layout is fighting you, and what the highest-impact moves look like before you commit to a full project. For teams ready to go further, the Signature Design Process™ takes you from discovery through implementation in a way that keeps your team’s day at the center of every decision.
Either way, the conversation starts the same way. Tell us what your day looks like.
PureAlchemy Design is a boutique commercial interior design studio creating brand-aligned environments for offices, retail, healthcare, and hospitality. We work in person with clients across the Minneapolis–St. Paul region and virtually with companies nationwide. Explore more of our office work at purealchemydesign.com/office-workspaces.
Learn more about office space planning and layout strategy.