Esnad Offices Riyadh

An office that is designed for 300 people and asked to absorb 400 — and eventually 550 — is not an office with a space problem. It is an office with a planning problem. The Esnad Company commission was a study in how spatial organization, rather than additional square meters, resolves the pressure that growth places on a working environment.

The project operated within the constraints of a rented building — an existing structural envelope that could not be modified at the level of its primary architecture. This constraint sharpened the design brief considerably. The question was not what to build but how to redistribute what already existed: how to read the movement patterns of a company whose staff ranges from ministers to managers to administrative employees, map the friction points in its daily circulation, and redesign the spatial allocation to serve a population significantly larger than the one the building was originally configured for, without compromising the working conditions of anyone within that range.

Location          Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Client            Esnad Company
Type              Office Interior — Spatial Reorganization
Current Capacity  300 employees
Design Capacity   400 employees / 550 by 2025
Status            Completed
Year              2024
Principal         Ibrahim Nawaf Joharji
Scope             Space Planning, Movement Analysis, Interior Design

The design process began with the company’s history and growth trajectory rather than with the existing floor plan. Understanding how Esnad’s administrative structure had evolved — how its departments relate to each other, where collaboration between teams is frequent and where independence is essential, how the hierarchical range from senior officials to support staff creates different spatial requirements within the same working day — produced a functional map before any spatial decision was made. The movement simulation that followed tested traffic flow through the existing circulation routes against the projected staff density, identifying the points at which the building’s current organization would generate congestion and inefficiency at full occupancy.

The spatial redistribution was governed by two principles that operated simultaneously. The first is that the design must serve every level of the organization with equal spatial quality — the democratic design approach that treats the minister’s requirement for a focused, private working environment and the staff member’s requirement for clear circulation and accessible collaboration space as equally valid briefs rather than as a hierarchy of spatial investment. The second is that the building must accommodate its 2025 population without a second redesign — the planning must absorb the growth that is already projected rather than responding to it when it arrives.

Algorithmic space planning was used to optimize the distribution of workstations, meeting rooms, and collaborative zones against the density maps the movement simulation produced. The algorithms identified configurations that minimized circulation conflict, equalized the distance from workstations to shared facilities across the full floor plate, and maintained the acoustic separation between focused work zones and the collaborative spaces that the company’s culture requires. The result is a spatial organization that the building’s existing structure can sustain at 550 occupants without producing the congestion and territorial ambiguity that unplanned growth generates in office environments.

The design methodology governing this type of data-driven spatial planning is detailed in how-we-work. For companies managing growth within existing building envelopes and seeking spatial reorganization that anticipates rather than reacts to that growth, the engagement framework is outlined in bespoke-architecture.