Solo Arquitetos Wraps an 85 m² Timber Company Office Around a Glazed Meeting Room in Brazil

Small offices usually fail in one of two ways. Either they get chopped into cubicles that make 85 square meters feel like 40, or they get flattened into an open plan with nowhere to take a call. For the FM Office, completed in 2018 in Brazil, Solo Arquitetos took a third route. The client is a timber company, and the brief centered on one idea: integrating the workspace.

What interests us is how literally the architects answered that brief. They did not tear out every wall. They put the one room that needs enclosure, the meeting space, in the middle of the floor and built it in glass. Everything else wraps around it in a continuous loop of plywood, timber slats and window light. Privacy and openness end up sharing the same square meters instead of competing for them.

A Glass Room at the Center of Everything

The meeting room is the hinge of the plan. Its oval table and black shell chairs sit under a slatted timber ceiling, and the glazing lets you look straight through to the hills outside. A meeting here does not cut anyone off from the rest of the office. It becomes part of the view.

The architects also vary the glass. Where the room meets the corridor, frosted panels give enough cover for a conversation, while clear doors keep sightlines open toward the slatted wall and shelving. It is a small move, but it shows the team set the level of exposure surface by surface instead of treating transparency as a blanket rule.

Working Along the Window Line

The desks go where the light is. A long plywood conference table faces corner windows that frame treetops, and a shared work table with rolling drawer units runs along a glazed wall toward the hillside. Nobody gets the window seat because everyone has it.

Even the pantry gets the same treatment. A narrow plywood kitchenette sits against the floor-to-ceiling glass with a planted shelf beside it, so making coffee happens along the building edge rather than in a back room. In an office this small, taking the service spaces to the perimeter is a deliberate choice, and it pays off in daylight.

Timber as the Client's Own Language

For a timber company, wood is the product, not just a finish. The reception corner makes that clear: a wooden lounge chair stands in front of a plywood logo wall and fluted panelling, and the first thing a visitor sees is the material the business trades in, shown at close range.

The vertical slats along the corridor work harder than decoration. They give the circulation path a rhythm, hold floating shelves for plants and a printer, and keep the office's equipment in view without clutter. Storage, display and wall become one element, which is the kind of economy an 85 square meter plan needs.

Private Without Being Shut Away

There is a private office, and it is honest about its limits. Glass walls frame a timber desk, black mesh chairs and floating oak shelves under a slatted ceiling. The person working inside has acoustic separation but stays visually part of the team.

The corridor leading there, lined with plywood panels and two wooden armchairs, doubles as a waiting area and ends at a window. Even the dead-end spaces get a view and somewhere to sit. That is integration down to the small details.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings explain what the photographs only suggest. The floor plan sets a glazed meeting volume at the center of an L-shaped floor, with workstations around the edge and the restrooms and seating area slotted into the remaining corners. The diagram traces a looping circulation path around that core, with view arrows pointing to the landscape on two sides.

The axonometric shows how few elements are doing the work: a long shared table, the glass room with its oval table, and timber slat walls carrying the shelving. You could list the whole design on one hand, and that restraint is its strength.

Why This Project Matters

Workplace design often treats integration as a social program of breakout zones, hot desks and branded slogans. Solo Arquitetos treats it as a spatial problem with a geometric answer: put the enclosed room in the middle, make it see-through, and run a loop around it so every route passes daylight and colleagues. At 85 square meters, that diagram is easy to read, and it would scale to larger floors without much change.

The project also shows how a client's identity can shape an interior without a heavy branding exercise. A timber company gets an office made mostly of timber, detailed with care and placed in good light. The material carries the message, and the architects did not need to add much else.

FM Office by Solo Arquitetos, Brazil. Area: 85 m². Year: 2018.

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