What should you consider when choosing office furniture?

When it comes to choosing furniture for a new office, it can quickly become overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Furniture selection isn’t simply a case of deciding the types of desks and chairs you like the most, it has to come from an understanding of the types of setting you need as well as how people in your business will use the space and the furniture within it.

Furniture is an essential part of workplace performance and helps support the day-to-day activity in the workplace. Research from Mitie found that full-time UK employees lose an average of 74 minutes each week to workplace-related inefficiencies. This survey of over 3,000 workers showed how poorly planned environments can directly affect performance. Ensuring that you have the right mix of desking, collaboration space and focus areas to provide the right amount of balance within the working environment.

Making decisions on office furniture is usually driven by budget but it is also being shaped by hybrid working and sustainability commitments. At Rhino Interiors, we believe that a successful furniture project begins by understanding what furniture an organisation needs to enhance their workspace. Typically, it is possible to reuse some existing furniture and replace other pieces so that the new items help deliver maximum impact.

Where should you start when choosing office furniture?

The starting point shouldn’t be a particular chair, desk or manufacturer. Naturally you may have your own preferences or taste but the furniture in your office should be driven by the people that use it everyday.

There are two ways of choosing new furniture for your office space. Either you are looking at furniture selection as part of the wider workplace design process or you are considering a workplace furniture refresh which is done outside of a fit out or refurbishment. In both instances, we always advise that furniture selection needs a good amount of consideration rather than being treated as a last minute decision.

To help build a brief for your office furniture, some of the questions you should know the answers to include:

• How many people will use it?
• What are they coming into the office to do?
• How much individual, collaborative and social space is required?
• Which settings will be used every day and which only occasionally?
• What furniture does the organisation already own?

Once you have considered some of these answers, you will be on the way to shaping a brief for your furniture package. This workplace furniture brief will also be informed by space planning and will help define how people will actually move through and work within the space.

For larger projects, bringing furniture expertise into the conversation early means space planning, furniture, budget and procurement decisions can develop together. It also creates an opportunity to understand the existing furniture estate before buying anything new. Recently there has been a rising trend in using ‘second life’ furniture which is also an intelligent way to enhance the sustainability of the furniture in your office.

What is second-life office furniture?

Second-life office furniture is furniture that has previously been used but has been refurbished or repaired so it can be used again. This is a service that we assist companies with alongside selected industry partners to ensure a high quality, sustainable furniture solution.

One of the reasons second-life furniture has become so popular is that an increased awareness around waste has pushed companies to look at alternatives. Rather than throwing away large amounts of furniture, it is now possible to reupholster and refurbish certain furniture items so they can be used again.

Surplus furniture from an organisation’s existing workspace can potentially be relocated elsewhere within the business, placed into storage for future projects, sold into the second-life market or passed into reuse networks. That makes furniture less of a one-off purchasing decision and more of an asset that can be managed throughout its lifecycle.

How is office furniture reused?

Businesses are increasingly looking at their existing furniture as an asset rather than something that automatically needs to be cleared when they relocate or refurbish.

Desks and bench systems are often relatively straightforward to retain where dimensions and configurations work within the new space. Specialist remanufacturing processes can go considerably further, including new desktops, metal respraying, acoustic-screen refurbishment and alterations to existing furniture.

Task and meeting chairs can be cleaned, repaired and reupholstered, with components such as castors, gas lifts, arm pads, foam and mechanisms replaced where necessary. A lot of the large global manufacturers are now running services specifically designed around this. Initiatives like Vitra’s Circle for Contract helps to keep Vitra products in circulation through reconditioning rather than replacing them entirely.

The deciding factor should always be whether the underlying product is worth saving. A good-quality chair with worn fabric may be an excellent candidate for refurbishment; an old chair offering inadequate ergonomic support probably isn’t. Similarly, furniture needs to work aesthetically and functionally within the new workplace rather than being retained simply to achieve a reuse target.

Is refurbished office furniture more sustainable?

Creating a circular economy and keeping furniture in use for longer can significantly reduce waste and it helps to avoid some of the embodied carbon associated with manufacturing new furniture. This means that refurbished furniture is more sustainable, and usually cheaper, than manufacturing new products.

WRAP reported in 2025 that Crown Workspace had remanufactured or refurbished more than 125,000 pieces of workplace furniture, diverting more than 2,800 tonnes of furniture into reuse and saving more than 7,100 tonnes of CO2e. JLL has also been applying circular principles across its workplaces. At its Leeds office, chairs were remanufactured rather than replaced, achieving a reported 65% embodied-carbon saving compared with buying new.

The UK Green Building Council has similarly highlighted remanufacturing as an opportunity to reduce the carbon and cost associated with office furniture. The opportunity, therefore, is bigger than simply finding somewhere responsible for unwanted furniture to go.

These examples show that the larger organisations are starting to look at ways they can make better decisions around office furniture. Improving the sustainability of your workspace is another way companies can benefit from being more strategic with their selection of furniture.

When is new office furniture the right decision?

The time to replace furniture and buy new is when existing products are approaching the end of their life, provide inadequate ergonomics, are  impractical to refurbish or simply no longer support the way the workplace needs to function.

The decision around buying new furniture was certainly more complex in the past but in most scenarios, organisations are looking at how they can enhance their workspace and invest in better furniture. We have seen plenty of examples where buying new is absolutely the right decision for a business. While every scenario is different, we would typically expect around 10-20% of second-life or reused furniture to be specified on a project with the rest being new products.

Organisations also need to be aware of their overall furniture footprint and how that impacts their workplace strategy. Offices may now require more acoustic booths, informal meeting settings, collaboration furniture, flexible tables and different types of individual work settings to support hybrid working. When your workplace suffers from a lack of supportive furniture and work settings, this is another sign that you need to look at replacing your existing furniture.

Like most design decisions, it’s about what makes the most sense. Budget is a key consideration but the products you specify need to perform so when you need furniture that is going to be used intensively every day, new furniture can offer better long-term value than choosing a cheaper alternative which will likely need replacing more quickly.

How do we manage an office furniture project?

Our team at Rhino Interiors is set up to deliver workplace furniture as part of an office refurbishment or relocation but they can also provide office furniture outside of a larger workplace project.

The way our team responds to office furniture requirements is to begin with understanding the client’s existing estate and identifying furniture suitable for retention, refurbishment or redeployment. We would then work alongside the workplace or real estate team to identify any gaps and source appropriate new or second-life products from across the market.

We work with suppliers and manufacturers across the industry so we are not restricted to using one product or provider. This gives you more choice and control over your specification and enables us to shape your furniture package around your requirements, sustainability objectives and available budget.

We also partner with specialist refurbishment and reuse partners which means we can look after the reupholstery and repairs to your existing furniture to help you integrate restored furniture into your final scheme. Our furniture team will manage the initial audit and specification all the way through to procurement and final installation.

Better furniture decisions, not simply more furniture

Creating a great workplace isn’t measured by how much new furniture arrives on installation day. Offices are constantly evolving so it is important to analyse the space at key stages after you’ve moved in or make an assessment of how you want your people to work in your office and compare that to the current settings and products in the workspace.

Making better decisions on furniture is not to say that you should only use second-life furniture or reuse your existing. The important thing is that companies are given access to more information and options about how they can refurbish their office space and how furniture fits into that equation.

From our experience, the most effective approach is to keep some furniture and replace everything else. We believe that modern workplaces need modern furniture solutions and that is not to simply always buy new furniture, but help them to understand what they actually need.If you are looking for office furniture solutions to refresh your workspace, get in touch with our specialist furniture team today.