Our team is getting shuffled to a different corner of the office. We’re now at the very far end, furthest from the kitchen, and about as far as you can get from a toilet. It’s still an upgrade in the sense that we get better views, and even a small balcony. Plus the room is smaller and cosier. Until now we’ve been occupying a quarter of a large room that is otherwise mostly unoccupied, so sometimes it feels like we’re rattling around in an empty crate. And it means that the room has often been a bit cold.

Today I learned how modern office interiors can work. There are these “wells” in the floor where cabling comes up. And it turns out that that’s all modular and adjustable. You lift up the carpet squares, under which there are floor squares, under which there is an almost knee-deep space with cables and ductwork. The floor pieces are only supported in the corners – the rest of the space is free to play with.

If, for example, you want to rearrange the desks in your room, you can move the cables around, put the floor piece with the well where you want the cables to come out of the floor, and put the rest of the floor back. New room layout, no messy cables, and no handymen required. At most you may need to cut out a space for the floor well in a new carpet piece, because the carpet pieces and the floor pieces don’t match each other in size.