I had long had my eye on our new office space. The two previous tenants are friends and I loved the location.

We first looked at it over the summer. It was just an empty space but it had the advantage of being fully built-out and well-kept.

I knew we had to make a plan or we’d be sitting on the floor, so we brought in our secret weapon: Interior Designer Jenn Ryckbost. Jenn quickly had an accurate mock-up of the entire space in SketchUp and we started designing what the space should look like.

We put the SketchUp file in Dropbox and the whole team started to give input. We tried to make the entire process transparent. We had a Basecamp project for discussions and tried to involve everyone in any part they were interested in.

Like building software, spending time in the design process got us a better result. We iterated daily, changing anything we didn’t like, and only placing orders when we were satisfied.

It was also great to have help with picking colors. If left to me, I probably would have left everything off-white. Jenn built us a great palette, and now we have great splashes of color, with a chalkboard wall too!

Steve got to work building most of our tables and we ordered everything else we needed. The day we got wifi setup, we didn’t have much more than our stand-up tables but we started working out of the new space. Ordering furniture can be slow (finally got our last batch a week ago) but it was great to know what we had in store.

The final result looks amazingly (but unsurprisingly) like our designs. We’ll post more photos soon or you can come to our Open House to see for yourself!