We Bought an Office. In 2026. On Purpose.

There is a great deal being written about the death of the office.

Apparently, we all want to work from home now. The daily commute is an anachronism, bricks-and-mortar offices are an expensive relic, and the future of work will take place from spare bedrooms and kitchen tables.

At Iconic, we have just bought an office.

In 2026.

On purpose.

This is not the beginning of a campaign to get everybody back behind a desk five days a week. We have not introduced mandatory office days and have no intention of doing so. Our project managers need to spend time on site, people sometimes work from home, and different kinds of work are better undertaken in different places.

Our experience has taught us, however, that having somewhere to work together matters to us.

I think the endless debate about whether home or office working is “better” rather misses the point. There is no universally correct place to work.

A much more interesting question is:

"what do your people actually need from a workplace?"

Eight years of getting it slightly wrong

When Darren and I started Iconic, we worked from home. There were only two of us and it made perfect sense.

Things became rather stranger once we started employing people.

Inviting employees into our house to work alongside us was clearly not going to be a sustainable solution. More importantly, we wanted somewhere we could actually be a team.

We rented a small serviced office.

It solved the immediate problem, although we rapidly outgrew it. There were other niggles too. At one point, another unit in the building became a gym. Our project managers would sit in the communal breakout space attempting to have professional conversations with clients while members of the public sprinted past carrying kettlebells.

We decided that perhaps this was not our forever home.

Our next office was a suite in the centre of Wokingham. We refurbished it and, for the past four years, we have been very happy there. It is beautiful, dog-friendly and within walking distance of my house. The latter two were non-negotiable because, ultimately, it is my company.

As it happens, five of our six team members now live within walking distance of Wokingham town centre. Apparently, Wokingham is an undocumented hotbed of project management.

The office has never been quite right, though.

It was the best available space when we needed it rather than somewhere chosen specifically for the way we work. It is too big. Our project managers are regularly on site and people sometimes work from home, which means that we can find ourselves rattling around in a lot of expensive empty space.

Paradoxically, some of the things we genuinely need are missing. The meeting-room walls are paper-thin, making genuinely private conversations almost impossible.

I once had an extremely tense meeting with a colleague which we moved to a nearby pub specifically because we needed privacy. Dolly, our office dog, was with me.

Just as our conversation was reaching the height of tension, a woman wandered over. Apparently oblivious to the frosty silence across the table, she began making an enormous fuss of the dog.

We paused while she chatted happily to Dolly, then launched straight back into our heated debate after she had left.

It was not an ideal environment for a difficult management conversation.

There are also the toilets.

We share them with other businesses in the building. This sounds trivial, and perhaps it is, but workplaces are experienced through hundreds of small interactions every day. Something does not need to be strategically important to be irritating when everybody encounters it several times a day.

Eventually, we realised that we were paying a considerable amount of money for more space than we needed while compromising on some of the things we actually valued.

What do we actually need an office to do?

This turned out to be a much more useful question.

We need enough room for everybody to work in the office at once if they want to, but we do not need a collection of permanently assigned desks sitting empty for half the week.

Darren and I will share a desk because we are rarely there at the same time. Other people may technically have “their” desk, but there will be plenty of opportunity to move around the building according to what they are doing.

Someone who wants company or collaboration can take their laptop into the large kitchen and event space. Someone who is simply feeling chatty can do precisely the same thing.

Someone who needs to concentrate can disappear into one of the smaller rooms and shut the door.

We need somewhere confidential conversations can actually be confidential. We need somewhere to hold team meetings, eat lunch together and welcome clients and suppliers without everything feeling unnecessarily formal.

We need parking. We need dogs to be welcome.

We also need personality.

Our current office is not bland and corporate, and we were not prepared for the next one to be either. A workplace does not need to resemble an anonymous serviced office in order to be professional. If we are going to spend a significant proportion of our lives somewhere, I want it to feel like us.

What we do not need is an office as evidence that people are working.

There is very little value in requiring somebody to sit at a particular desk because Tuesday has arbitrarily been designated an office day. Equally, there is little sense in somebody commuting into Wokingham merely to sit alone wearing headphones and spend the entire day on Teams.

The office needs to earn its place.

Why come in at all?

I have my own reasons for preferring to work in the office.

The first is extremely practical: I am hopeless at working from home.

I find it almost impossible to focus. Faced with a day of work at home, I will suddenly discover an urgent need to do some gardening, put the washing on, vacuum the house or cook an unnecessarily elaborate dinner. I can find an astonishing number of entirely legitimate things to do, provided none of them is the work I am supposed to be doing.

The office gives me a boundary. When I am there, I work.

My second reason is that I work with great people whose company I genuinely enjoy. I like being around them. Work occupies too much of our lives for that to be an insignificant consideration.

My third reason is probably the most important.

Much of my understanding of what is happening within Iconic is acquired by osmosis.

I listen to the conversations taking place around me. I hear when somebody is frustrated, when a project has hit a blocker, when something interesting is developing or when there is cause for celebration. Sometimes I become involved; frequently I do not. Being present gives me a sense of the business that I could never acquire from a dashboard or a succession of scheduled meetings.

I am not a construction professional, yet I know a surprising amount about construction and project management. Almost none of that knowledge has come from somebody sitting me down and teaching me. I have acquired it over years of listening, asking questions and being present in the room.

The same principle applies to more junior members of the team. Some professional development can and should be deliberate, but not all learning arrives conveniently labelled as training. It happens when somebody overhears a conversation, asks a question across a desk or watches an experienced colleague deal with something difficult. Much of what we learn from one another happens without anybody consciously setting out to teach it.

This is one reason why I am reluctant to reduce the value of an office to productivity. Sometimes its value lies in the information, relationships and understanding that accumulate just because people occupy the same space.

I was conscious, however, that these were my reasons. I asked the team a very simple question: why do you choose to come into the office when you could work from home?

The answers were interesting precisely because they were different.

Tabindah values both the journey and the opportunity to see colleagues who spend much of their working lives on site:

“I love my commute to work, as I drive through a beautiful, scenic forest — always a nice, calming way to start the day. Our office is also a lovely space, and as the team are mostly out on site, it’s great to catch up in person when we’re all together. And to see Dolly, of course...!”

Oscar values something quite different:

“I prefer leaving work at work and having physical separation in terms of work / life balance!”

Darren, characteristically, managed to express his answer in considerably fewer words than the rest of us:

“Quite simply, because it’s part of our home and us.”

Billy shared: “For me, coming into the office helps me focus on work. I like having a cosy, tidy environment with good natural light and a nice atmosphere. Every little thing, like the smell of freshly brewed coffee and people chatting around, can invigorate me. You don’t quite get this when working from home.”

Four people, four rather different answers. For Tabindah, the office provides connection. For Oscar, it provides separation. For Darren, it provides a sense of belonging and identity. For Billy it’s about focus and atmosphere.

My reasons are different again.

None of this proves that offices are better than working from home. It demonstrates why I think any attempt to identify a single “future of work” is rather misguided. People are not interchangeable, and neither is the work they do. The environment which helps one person concentrate may drive another to distraction. The commute one person regards as wasted time may provide another with a valuable transition between home and work.

The question for employers should not therefore be, “How many days should people be in the office?”

It should be, “What does being together enable us to do that we would otherwise lose?”

For us, the answer includes collaboration, friendship, learning, mentoring, separation between home and work, a sense of belonging and the rather less tangible organisational awareness that comes from simply being present.

It also, apparently, includes access to Dolly.

The rather less philosophical bit

There was, of course, also money.

Our accountant, Luke, identified that we were spending a lot on rent. He was right.

We spent some time looking for alternative premises to rent, but there was nothing suitable. Cost saving mattered, although we were not prepared to make significant compromises to save a few quid. Moving from an expensive office that did not quite work to a cheaper office that worked even less well did not strike us as progress.

One day, while driving around Wokingham's one-way system, I noticed that one of the historic overhang buildings in the town centre was for sale by auction.

We went to see it and realised that, rather unexpectedly, it offered almost everything we had been looking for.

Darren's pension bought the building, giving him an asset that can contribute to his retirement while providing Iconic with a workplace that better suits the business. According to Luke, once we are established there, the move should save Iconic approximately £40,000 a year.

That is not saving a few quid.

Those savings give us choices. We can invest elsewhere in the business, including in our people, systems and innovation. They may also help us absorb some rising costs rather than automatically passing every increase on to our clients.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is emphatically not a promise that Iconic will never put its prices up!

The luxury of fixing our own loo

Ownership gives us something else that I had probably underestimated: control.

The windows in our current office are single glazed. We wanted to replace them with double glazing to improve thermal efficiency, but the windows are the landlord's responsibility and the landlord did not want to replace them.

They are, therefore, still single glazed.

The same principle applies to much smaller things. If the light in the loo breaks in our new building, we will not have to report it, wait for somebody else to authorise a repair and wonder when they will eventually get around to it.

We will fix the bloody light.

This is hardly the stuff of visionary leadership, but perhaps that is the point.

A good workplace is not defined by grand statements about culture or a slide in a property strategy. It is experienced in hundreds of mundane ways by the people using it. The temperature matters. Privacy matters. Having somewhere quiet matters. Being able to sit with other people when you want company matters. The loo light matters.

Having control of the building means that, when something is not working for our team, we can do something about it.

The office isn't dead. It just needs a reason to exist.

Our experience does not prove that everybody secretly wants to return to the office. It certainly does not prove that remote working has failed.

It proves something much less decisive, but, I think, more useful:

There is no universally correct place to work.

Different businesses need different things. Different people need different things. Even the same person needs different things depending upon what they are trying to accomplish.

We have chosen to have an office because our experience tells us that being together has value. We have chosen a smaller one because being together does not mean everybody needs to be there every day. We are creating different spaces within it because collaboration, concentration, mentoring, confidential conversations and eating lunch together do not all require the same environment.

We have chosen to buy because, in our particular circumstances, ownership gives us greater control while substantially reducing the company's costs.

There is nothing especially futuristic about our new workplace.

It is a small, historic building in the middle of Wokingham. Its 500-year-old beams appeal enormously to the recovering medievalist in me. We are filling it with dark green walls, comfortable spaces, people, dogs, conversation and, at long last, our own toilets.

It is smaller than our current office, but uses its space much better. There are separate rooms for focused or confidential work, a large kitchen where we can gather, space for the whole team when we want to be together, and enough flexibility for people to move around according to what they are doing. It also has character in abundance. In other words, it gives us more of what we actually need, while giving us considerably less of what we don't.

Perhaps the future of work does not need to look futuristic.

Perhaps we should stop asking where people should work and pay more attention to what people and their work actually need, then create places which enable them to do it well. 

Author

Lizzie Hewitt

Lizzie is the driving force behind Iconic Project Management. She thrives on crafting creative strategies that set the company apart, ensuring every project delivers maximum value for clients.

Her leadership is built on a people-first approach—empowering the team with the right tools, support, and culture to do what they do best: deliver outstanding projects on time, on budget, and on brief.

Passionate about innovation and continuous improvement, Lizzie is committed to making the construction industry a place where people and projects thrive.