Future-Fit From Day One

Functional design

When asked how he designs a space for genuine use, Elmar says the foundations of a building and the final design are two sides of the same coin. While you need a quality design to bring people in, you need to get the functional commodities right to make them stay.

The first things to consider, Elmar says, is fresh air and climate, then acoustics, with greenery and adjustable lighting also important. "But climate and acoustics usually come first,” he says.

They matter most because they are the hardest to add once a space is built, and the first to be cut when costs rise. "Climate is usually a very expensive factor," he says. "Acoustics is really intangible up front but, when done right, creates a long-term benefit for everyone working in a space, especially in an open office."

He specifies too: "'Air conditioning' is too shallow. It's the climate itself."

Climate means the whole indoor environment rather than a cooling unit in the ceiling. It covers the volume of fresh air coming in, the temperature and humidity it arrives at, how evenly it is distributed so that nobody sits in a draught or a warm pocket, and how much of it can be adjusted zone by zone.

According to Dutch building regulations (Besluit bouwwerken leefomgeving, Art. 4.122), new offices have to supply at least 6.5 dm³ of fresh air per second per person. Once people are in the building, CO₂ is the simplest way to tell whether the system is keeping up. Dutch workplace health and safety guidance puts good air quality below 800 ppm, treats 800 to 1200 ppm as acceptable, and reads anything higher as a sign of insufficient ventilation. The same guidance gives 20 to 24 degrees and 40 to 60 per cent relative humidity as the ranges most people find comfortable for desk work.

In short, the invisible things matter. An ordinary office with good air and acoustics will outperform a beautiful one with stuffy meeting rooms and loud working spaces.

Some buildings will already have the climate and acoustics sorted to a good standard before you arrive. That’s the ideal outcome to look for. But don’t assume. Know the standards and what’s needed for a functional space before you view the building and customise to suit your needs from the beginning if they’re not already met.

Designing for a company you can't yet see

At some point, future-fitting stops being a checklist and becomes a way of thinking. How do you design for a version of your company that doesn't exist yet?

"It's really difficult to foresee the future," Elmar admits. "But if you have a slightly more stable company, then I'd say: be flexible. You could put a lot of money into really expensive stuff, but it's fixed. Or you could be a bit more flexible, if we change this around, then you can change it."

Being flexible doesn't mean going cheap. "People experience quality. Everyone experiences quality; they might perceive it in different ways, but everyone experiences it," he says.

"If you have a Vitra chair, it's still good after fifteen or twenty years, because it was well designed. So don't cheap your way into a solution. Go for quality, because that will be much more durable over time."

The work.club view:

use less, build to last

work.club CEO Martijn Roordink has spent twentyfive years in the business of space. He built Spaces into one of the largest flexible-workspace networks in the world before selling it and founding work. club and .re-group, which rethinks how buildings are used via its flexible workspace and property ecosystem. His case for a future-fit office begins, counterintuitively, with using less of it.

"In the Netherlands we have fifty million square metres of office space, far too much," Martijn says. As reflected in his signature line "laat je vastgoed los" or 'let go of your real estate', the most sustainable decision of all is often to build less.

For a growing company that means sizing the office to how people genuinely use it. With hybrid as the norm, spaces are rarely fully occupied as they were prior to Covid. So designing multi-function rooms that earn their keep across the day instead of sitting empty between meetings is one way to reduce your footprint. As is using upcycled materials as much as possible.

Taking work.club W70 in Rotterdam, for example, what might have typically been overhauled or discarded, the team took what was left behind by the previous renter and transformed it to match their vision. "Every material we used was reused from what was already in the building," says Martijn. "It's extremely important."

When it comes to choosing where to spend, Martijn says to start with the building itself. The foundational elements.

"The functional design is what's premium," he says. "You pay rent for a building that performs well: the installations, keeping it cool, reflecting the sun, the right materials."

The rising minimum

Some of this is no longer optional. In the Netherlands, offices have been required to hold at least an energy label C since 2023. Below that, a building cannot legally be used, and the direction of travel is towards label A by 2030. Henk Schouten, a senior project manager at Hospitality Group who designs the service areas inside these buildings, is currently working on one where the owner has decided to go well beyond the minimum requirement.

"We have an order from a building owner who says, I want it future-proof, and it must be Paris Proof. I'm happy to invest a lot of money now to make it Paris Proof, because I know many tenants will want to rent it," Henk says. "For him the money is no problem."

Paris Proof is the Dutch Green Building Council's benchmark for a building that matches the Paris Agreement: no more than 70 kWh per m² a year in measured energy use, against a Dutch office average of around 195.

The owner isn’t just doing a ‘nice’ thing. He’s protecting the letting value of the building, which is a useful signal about what tenants are expected to be asking for by the time your own lease comes up for renewal. The legal minimum keeps rising, and the easiest time to get ahead of it is while the fit-out is already open.

The simple upgrades 

With so many acronyms to get to know, it can sound like a lot to digest, but some of the highest returns cost the least: healthy food and beverages, real planting, daylight and adjustable light, and somewhere quiet to retreat to.

On the drinks, the default has already moved. Henk treats a healthy offer as part of the concept rather than an upgrade to it.

"In the early days we'd install a fridge with a glass door full of all kinds of Coke," he says. "We definitely don't do that anymore. We only put healthy drinks in those fridges."

It goes in at the start rather than getting added later. "It's already part of our concept design. In the concept we talk about achieving a happy customer and a happy employee, and how to give them the pieces to make that happen. One of those pieces is a nice pantry with a drink you can choose, and it's important that it's healthy."

Hydration shows how little it can take to meet a real standard, and it's increasingly expected. Water is one of WELL's ten concepts, with points scored simply for a visible water point roughly every thirty metres. Movement, Nourishment and Mind sit alongside it, which is how sport, food and quiet space end up on the same scorecard as ventilation and materials.

Employers are backing it at scale. According to the International WELL Building Institute, 557 million m² of real estate was engaged with the standard by July 2025, across nearly 100,000 locations in 137 countries and more than 180 Fortune and Global 500 companies. That is twelve times the footprint of early 2020, and the milestone was announced at IWBI's 2025 Social Sustainability Summit in Amsterdam.

The market has moved with it. Company sports subscriptions like Urban Sports Club and ClassPass have become popular ways to support employees, with massage and mindfulness alongside the gyms. Adyen lists daily lunch, a stocked kitchen and an onsite barista among the reasons to work at its Amsterdam head office. Meanwhile Dutch fit-out suppliers now sell low-stimulus rooms as a standard product line, while a decade ago a quiet room meant a spare meeting room with the blinds down.

As Martijn puts it: "The new generation thinks hard about hydration, wellbeing, food, sport, those crucial elements. And this is the new way of property management: you can actually organise it, it's part of the plan."

Building for tomorrow 

Future-fitting doesn't mean trying to predict exactly what your company will look like in five to ten years. It means making the space work well today while giving it the quality, flexibility and foundations to keep working tomorrow.

The best choices aren't necessarily the most visible ones. Good air, acoustics, daylight, materials, hydration and spaces that can adapt as your company changes may not make the biggest impression on move-in day, but they shape how the office feels and performs long after.

And as expectations around wellbeing, sustainability and building performance continue to rise, meeting today's minimum is unlikely to be enough for long.

Build for what your people need now. Build well enough that it still works for what comes next, and avoid paying twice.