Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. Companies mandating return-to-office are grappling with the counterintuitive truth that making employees want to come back requires making the workplace feel less like work. Interior designers are now urging businesses to abandon traditional cubicle farms in favor of hospitality-inspired spaces—think resort lobbies and upscale restaurants rather than fluorescent-lit rows of desks. 

The shift involves strategic location selection, mood-based room designs, hotel-quality wellness suites, and seamless technology integration. Assigned seating plummeted 46 percent in 2025 as workers demand flexibility and variety throughout their day. The office interior design market is booming toward $92.7 billion by 2030, but the real revolution isn't only about how the office looks. It’s also about learning to adapt to a much different workplace than we’ve ever known. 

In this story you’ll find:

BY KAYLA WEBSTER, STAFF EDITOR

If your company is ordering workers back to the office, they might be more productive in a functional and inviting environment. That’s why interior designers are telling business clients to design workplaces that don’t look so much like, well, an office. The new workplace look should take inspiration from resorts and high-end restaurants.

Elizabeth Von Lehe, senior design leader at the New York firm CannonDesign and chair of ASID, a trade group for interior designers, tells Inc. that founders need to “make the office worth the commute.” And they can do that by borrowing design principles from the hospitality industry, which go beyond simple aesthetics and are vital to engaging guests and creating repeat business.

In 2023, the global office interior design market was valued at $69.06 billion. It is projected to grow to $92.7 billion by 2030, according to an analysis by New York market research firm 24MarketReports.

“From hospitality, you understand that people come together for very different reasons and want a sort of contraction and expansion of this story arc during the hospitality experience,” Von Lehe says. “But explain to me why every workday can’t also be a hospitality experience in that same way.”

Employers know workers aren’t happy with return-to-office mandates—the flexibility of remote work helps people balance professional and personal responsibilities, and that’s hard to beat. While some companies are forcing employees to come back full time, up to five days a week, others prefer to take a gentler approach that hopefully gets workers excited about coming in.

“The main pain [employers] share is, ‘I need to do a better job making people happy in the office so they actually want to come in two or three days a week—not just to comply with an RTO mandate,’” says Thierry Ondet, the managing director at ROOM, the portable conference room and private office design firm famous for its phone booth meeting rooms.  

Employees don’t want to work in traditional office settings any more, according to Von Lehe. If they can’t work remotely, they at least want to work in a space that’s designed for flexibility. That means the assigned desk is on its way out. The latest ASID data shows assigned office seating nosedived in 2025 by more than 46 percent from the year prior.

Ondet observed that offices need to “flow” in such a way that supports how employees want to work. ROOM’s Manhattan office and showroom was designed to illustrate this concept—there’s open desk seating near the private phone booth models, so employees can quickly step away to take a call. ROOM’s larger units are placed on the other side of the SoHo office in an L shape, so workers can use them for bigger meetings, filming podcasts, or as a private office. The building’s large windows let in tons of natural light and opportunities to “people watch” in SoHo—not a bad setup for the company’s cafe during lunchtime, or to “wow” a new client.

To create a similar vibe in your office, here are four hospitality design elements Von Lehe and Ondet recommend to upgrade your workplace:

That real estate cliche, “location, location, location” is crucial to creating a hospitality-inspired workspace. When looking for an office space, Von Lehe advises companies to follow the “20-minute rule.” That means access to services and amenities like restaurants, dry cleaners, bars, and entertainment—like a sports arena or theater—should be accessible in a 20-minute walk. It’s important for both clients and employees, who may want to enjoy these offerings after work.

“The idea of the 20-minute neighborhood is really big because it impacts so heavily what the programming is that they have to provide on site,” Von Lehe says. “You don’t need to provide as many amenity spaces if you are surrounded by them.”

Von Lehe says companies should work with an interior designer to create the mood they want. Companies aren’t limited to specific color palettes—it’s a fun, creative part of the process, she says—but they should include different textures and choose seating designed for comfort and functionality. Your designer might recommend creating a different vibe to suit each space in your office, depending on what it’s being used for.

“Some of them are bright and poppy, others are maybe very introverted and moody, and another is really wide open and daylit and sun-drenched because each of those has a very different personality,” Von Lehe says. “The ability for somebody over the course of their work day to choose not only different work settings, but mood settings, is what’s really coming up and increasing in demand right now.”

Wellness rooms should look like a “hotel suite, not a closet,” Von Lehe says. To meet a range of staff needs, such as nursing mothers needing to pump breast milk or neurodivergent employees finding a place to decompress, these spaces should be calming. Von Lehe says the same care and attention should be used on these spaces as the rest of the office. Ideally, it should have comfortable furniture, calming art, and the lighting and sound should be customizable for the needs of the person using it.

If you aren’t able to build one of these rooms in your office, Ondet says various ROOM models can easily be transformed into a wellness space. The walls of these units are made from plastic bottles—providing a sustainable option to muffle sounds from inside and outside the room. And if you move to a new location, the wellness room is portable and can be used in your new office.

Ondet says his company’s larger pods are increasingly being ordered for use as wellness rooms. At minimum, these customizable pods only need “a very comfy chair and dimmed lighting” to transform them into “a place where employees can go and relax,” he says.

Any features using technology should be a seamless, on-demand user experience, similar to what high-end restaurants and hotels try to create, Von Lehe says. She already recommended features for customizing lighting and sound, but the modern workplace should be able to accommodate hybrid work, Von Lehe says. 

Ondet says customers are using their larger meeting pods for that purpose. These pods have the option to be outfitted with a television and camera conferencing system so workers can collaborate with colleagues who are not physically in the office.

But that doesn’t mean cramming all the in-office workers into one pod—to ensure everyone has a pleasant experience and equal voice, Ondet says many clients split meetings into multiple pods so everyone can clearly be seen on the monitors. Soft-spoken employees may find this feature especially helpful.

“Everyone has the same chance to be able to interact,” Ondet says.

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