Quiet by Design: Making Room for Focus in a Flexible Workspace

Open, social, flexible workspaces are wonderful places to meet people. They are not always easy places to concentrate. A shared floor is full of energy, conversation and movement, and that is exactly what makes it feel alive. But everyone who works in one knows the other side of it too. Sometimes you simply need quiet. A private call. An hour to finish something without interruption. Productivity depends on having both the buzz of a community and the calm to focus when it matters.

One practical answer to that is the acoustic booth: a self-contained space that brings a pocket of quiet onto an open floor. Makers like MEAVO, a European manufacturer of office phone booths and meeting pods, have spent years refining them. The thinking behind them is that a good workspace should let people focus as easily as it lets them connect. This sits close to how we approach our own spaces at EDGE Workspaces.

The quiet side of productivity

We think a lot about how people work across a day. Some of the best moments in a shared workspace are social. A chance conversation over coffee, a quick exchange that turns into a new idea, or a team gathered around a single table. But real productivity also needs the opposite. Deep, focused work rarely happens in the gaps between interruptions. It needs a clear run at it.

Studies of open-plan spaces keep pointing to the same thing. It is not general noise that breaks concentration so much as overheard speech, because the mind cannot help following words it can make out. A single distraction is small. Repeated across a day, it quietly slows everything down and chips away at the quality of the work. A workplace that offers connection but nowhere to focus has solved only half the problem.

Flexible workspaces feel this more than most. On a single floor, at the same hour, one person may be deep in a spreadsheet while a team runs a workshop and someone else takes back-to-back calls. That variety is the whole point. It only works when the space can hold all of it at once, without any one kind of work getting in the way of the others.

It is one reason people are thoughtful about when they come in at all. Many can do heads-down work at home. They come to a shared space for the things they cannot get on their own, such as company, energy, and a proper room for a meeting. A workspace earns that trip when it offers both the connection people come for and the focus they still need once they arrive.

Bringing quiet into busy spaces

This is the part of the picture MEAVO has worked on since 2018. The idea is simple. You place a booth in the middle of a busy floor that is small enough for one person to take a call or concentrate, or large enough for a few people to talk without booking a meeting room. What matters is that it is genuinely quiet inside, and that it is there the moment someone needs it.

To support this, we rely on the MEAVO Classic Line. For individual focus, the Soho Phone Booth provides a dedicated retreat. It features motion-activated LED lighting and an active ventilation system powered by dual fans to keep the air fresh. It also integrates wireless Qi charging directly into the custom work surface to ensure devices stay powered during long calls. When a member needs more room to spread out, the MEAVO Workstation acts as a private office within the office. It includes a deeper desk space and built-in HDMI connection for uninterrupted video conferencing.

For collaborative work, the Camden Meetingbox is available in configurations for two or four people. It offers a secluded environment equipped with comfortable benches upholstered in high-quality Camira fabric. The Camden pods feature an advanced ventilation system with six fans to ensure the space remains comfortable during extended team meetings.

What separates a good booth from a token gesture is that the quiet is real and measured, rather than simply implied. The better ones are independently tested for how much sound they actually keep out, and built to take constant daily use. MEAVO booths are rigorously tested to ISO 23351-1 standards to ensure exceptional speech level reduction. The goal is a simple one: to give people somewhere to focus, close at hand, without walling them off from the room around them.

Seen this way, a booth is less a piece of furniture than part of how a floor is designed to work. It has to perform to a known standard, sit comfortably alongside everything else, stand up to constant daily use, and match the sustainability standards of the building around it. That is a lot to ask of something people walk past without a second thought. It is also the difference between a box that looks the part and one that protects focus day after day.

Because the booths are self-contained and easy to move, they also fit the way flexible workspaces change. A floor is rarely the same from one year to the next as teams grow, shrink and rearrange. A booth can move with them, which means the quiet stays wherever the work happens to need it.

A place for every kind of work

Good workspaces are not one thing. Across a single day, the same person might want an open desk near other people in the morning, a meeting room for an hour after lunch, and somewhere quiet to finish a report before they leave. We think of our spaces as a range people can move through freely, matching the setting to the task rather than forcing the task to fit the setting.

Acoustic booths complete that range. They sit between the open floor and the meeting room, acting quicker to reach than a booked room, and far more private than a corner of the lounge. For environments that demand an elevated aesthetic, MEAVO offers the Haven Line. The Haven One and Haven Focus booths elevate acoustic privacy by incorporating natural oak melamine finish panels that blend seamlessly into biophilic office designs. The Haven Focus accommodates a standard ergonomic office chair for supreme comfort during intense concentration. For larger groups, the Haven Two and Haven Four meeting pods provide a luxurious collaborative space.

For a member who suddenly needs to take a call, or an hour of real concentration, having one of these acoustic spaces a few steps away is the difference between staying in flow and losing it. Small, well-placed choices like this are a large part of what makes a busy workspace genuinely productive.

Sustainability as a shared value

Sustainability runs through all of this, and it is often where our own priorities and those of the people we work with meet. Sustainability shapes everything we do: from the buildings we operate in, to our commitment to reach net zero by 2050. It grew directly out of our roots. EDGE Workspaces is part of Edge, the developer behind The Edge in Amsterdam, a building widely regarded as one of the greenest and most advanced offices ever built. That standard is the one we still measure ourselves against.

When selecting partners, we look for companies that take this challenge just as seriously. MEAVO shares our commitment to the environment. The acoustic felt lining the interior of every MEAVO cabin is manufactured using over 800 recycled plastic bottles, which directly reduces global plastic waste. Furthermore, their main frames are constructed entirely from natural wood materials certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, ensuring responsible forestry practices.

Their impact extends beyond manufacturing. For every product sold, MEAVO plants 15 trees in Madagascar to support global reforestation. They also donate two solar lamps to families in Zambia to provide clean energy to underserved communities. Due to these rigorous efforts, MEAVO has been awarded the prestigious EcoVadis Gold Star Rating. This certification places them in the top 5 percent of companies globally for their environmental initiatives.

It shows in the smaller decisions, too. Something that is well made and built to last stays in use for years rather than being replaced. Materials chosen with care mean less waste over a product’s life. For a workspace measured on its own footprint, those details add up. We would always rather bring in fewer, better things that are made to endure than keep replacing what wears out, and we tend to look for the same instinct in the makers we work with.

A workplace built around people

At EDGE Workspaces, we design for how a working day actually feels. Our spaces rest on three values: hospitality, connection, and sustainable design, with wellbeing as our higher purpose. You tend to notice them as small, everyday things. Reception staff who know your name and your guests. A barista-made coffee to start the morning, and a restaurant with something healthy when it is time for lunch. Plenty of daylight and greenery throughout. A gym for when a clear head needs a moving body, a library for quiet reading, and an outdoor terrace for the days that call for fresh air. The point of all of it is the same. We want to take the friction out of a day so people can get on with their work and enjoy being there while they do it.

We design just as deliberately for connection. A workspace is more than a place to sit. It is a community, and we build ours on purpose through lounges made for a chance conversation, shared lunches, and a regular calendar of events that gives people a reason to meet. Our members range from independent professionals and fast-growing teams to established companies, and a good part of the value of a shared space is simply who you end up sitting next to.

That approach has a history behind it. We opened our first location at EDGE Olympic in Amsterdam in 2020 and have grown steadily since, expanding across the Netherlands and Germany. From Stadium in Amsterdam to Grand Central in Berlin and HafenCity in Hamburg, with new homes opening in Rotterdam and Eindhoven. Each one keeps the same commitment to hospitality, design and sustainability, while taking on the character of the city around it. The aim is never simply to add floors, but to bring the same quality of day to more people in more places.

Grand Central, in the heart of Berlin, brings all of this together. It is a place where sustainability, thoughtful design and a genuine sense of welcome meet, just a short walk from the city’s main station. It suits everyone from independent professionals to larger teams. People who want to enjoy coming in, and to do their best work once they are there. Acoustic comfort is part of that mix. You rarely notice it when it is working. You only remember the day the noise made a deadline impossible. Building quiet into a space from the start is a quiet form of care, and it is the kind of detail that turns a workspace people tolerate into one they genuinely like.

A shared way of thinking about work

The way we work keeps changing, and expectations change with it. People increasingly look for workspaces that support the whole of their day, both the social parts and the focused parts alike. Meeting that expectation is less about any single feature than about how the many pieces of a space fit together.

A booth manufacturer like MEAVO comes at this from the product side, working on the booths and pods that make focus easy to find. We come at it from the space side. It is different work with the same aim: creating places where people can concentrate without giving up the community around them.

That is where the thinking lines up. Both of us start from the idea that healthy, well-designed environments help people do better work. At EDGE, everything from the layout of our shared spaces to the design of our private offices and meeting rooms is meant to support wellbeing, productivity and community. Quiet, focused space is part of that picture, not an afterthought.

In the end, productivity is not about pushing harder. It is about being in a place where good work comes naturally, with company when you want it, and quiet when you need it. That is a useful reminder that the best workspaces are built from many small, thoughtful choices rather than one big one.