Sector · technology
Workplace and specialist facilities for technology tenants.
Offices, labs, test facilities, comms rooms and light assembly space for technology and engineering businesses across South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.
The constraint
A technology tenancy is an office with a technical building inside it.
The workplace half is straightforward. The half with the equipment in it is where the programme and the services capacity actually go.
Technology tenants tend to need two buildings in one lease: a normal workplace, and a set of rooms with requirements that a commercial tenancy was never sized for. Server and comms rooms, test benches, prototyping and light assembly, secure areas, and sometimes a laboratory.
Those rooms bring dedicated cooling, dedicated power, containment, acoustic separation, vibration and access control. Each of them draws on base building capacity that has to be confirmed in writing, and each of them carries a lead time that the workplace half does not.
What we build
The two halves, and where they meet.
Workplace
Open plan, collaboration, meeting rooms, end-of-trip and front of house. Technology tenants typically brief higher occupant density and heavier power and data provision than a professional services tenant, which changes the services design more than the layout does.
Comms and server rooms
Dedicated cooling with its own condenser location, dedicated and often backed-up power, containment, early warning detection and access control. Physically small and disproportionately complex.
Test, prototyping and light assembly
Benches, three-phase supply, extraction, compressed air, floor loading and goods access. A small industrial fitout inside a commercial tenancy.
Laboratories
Where a technology tenant needs a laboratory, the containment, ventilation and services requirements are a separate discipline. We treat them as such.
Secure and restricted areas
Where a client works under a customer’s security requirements, access control, separation, cabling segregation and construction access all follow from those requirements rather than from convenience.
Growth
Technology tenancies change shape faster than most. Where a client anticipates it, designing spare capacity and a modular services strategy now is far cheaper than a second project later.
Sizing the room
Start at the equipment, finish at the room.
Nearly every comms room problem we are called into started with someone nominating a room on a plan before anyone had added up what was going into it.
The small rooms carry the programme. The open plan never does.
Technology workplace · library image
The technical half
What each of those rooms actually needs.
Dedicated power
Its own circuit, often backed up, sized from the equipment rather than from the floor area.
Dedicated cooling
A high heat load in a small room, with a condenser that needs somewhere to reject to.
Access control
Tied to the base building system, with cabling segregation where a customer requires it.
Containment and growth
Cable containment sized for what comes next, because the second fitout costs more than the spare tray did.
Where we add value
What we bring to a technology fitout.
The base building questions: cooling, riser capacity, condenser locations, structural allowance. Answered in writing before the design commits to anything.
The specialist plant in the technical rooms is ordered against a design that has to be frozen first. We identify those items in week one.
Technology tenants frequently need to move in before the whole tenancy is finished. Planned deliberately, it works. Requested late, it costs.
The workplace and the technical rooms are coordinated by the same people, which is where the interfaces stop falling between parties.
Questions
Can you build the server room as part of the fitout?
Yes, and it should be part of the same contract. Splitting it out is where the coordination problems start.
We need to be in before the whole floor is done. Possible?
Usually, with staged completion designed into the programme and the occupation certificate path considered from the outset.
Our customer imposes security requirements on our site. Can you work to them?
Yes. Tell us what the requirements are and we build the site access, personnel and documentation arrangements around them.
Do you do laboratory work too?
Yes. There is a separate page covering laboratory and research facility construction in more detail.
Send us the floor plan and the equipment list.
The equipment list tells us more about your project than the workplace brief does.
Submit a project briefRelated
Where to go next.
- Office constructionWorkplace projects, from a single floor to a whole building.
- Fitout and refurbishmentWorking inside an existing building, including one that has to keep operating.
- Laboratories and research facilitiesContainment, ventilation and equipment loads, where the services are the project.
- Commercial constructionOffices, retail, hospitality and institutional work, from fitout to new build.