Office Kitchens and Teapoints

Octopus Interiors supply and install office kitchens and tea points throughout London. We offer a wide choice of contemporary styles, finishes and colours from a range of stocked kitchens available on a fast delivery programme. In keeping with the modern London office, the range includes a number of popular high gloss and smooth solid colours as well as the more conventional wood effect finishes.

With its clean-lines and modern appearance and an affordable price tag, the Greenwich Kitchen range is our most popular offering (images of some of our installations shown on this page).

We are a general office refurbishment company, so we are also able to supply and fit all of the other components that are usually required to complete or complement the installation, such as plumbing, electrical power sockets, tiling and splash-backs, extractors, lighting and vinyl flooring. We will also design the layout using CAD space planning software.

Built in fridges, dishwashers, washing machines and cookers are also available with the range.

More than just a place to make a cup of coffee

Office space, particularly in Central London, is now at a premium price.  At typical prices between £100 and in excess of £200 per square foot (including rent, rates and service charges) our customers are finding ways to optimise every square inch.  Smaller desks, hot-desking and informal meeting or drop-in areas are all ways by which this is being achieved. But rather than creating separate areas which might not all be fully utilised at the same time, consider combining them with the kitchen as the focal point.  An extended area incorporating the usual kitchen utility cabinets and appliances, breakfast bars and café tables with laptop and iPad charging that people can work from (whilst enjoying a coffee or having their lunch) and lounge seating that doubles up as relaxation time or quiet-time working and informal meeting space.

Rather than enclosing the area behind partition walls, the combined breakout, café and meeting area can be an extension of an open-plan office area. With the use of luxury vinyl flooring and carpet tiles that are distinctively different from the work-side of the office, the two areas can flow seamlessly into one another whilst clearly defining the separation between the office and relaxation zones.  If necessary, free-standing acoustic screens can add a bit of visual and sound privacy as well as brightening up the area with the use of coloured fabrics.

Considerations for the positioning of an Office Kitchen

A teapoint cannot always be positioned where you ideally want it to be. If you are in the process of assessing the suitability of an office suite you are considering moving to, and that the position of the tea point is to be a key feature, or a critical factor in the way you wish your office to be configured, then it is important to clarify a few factors before signing the lease.  It needs to be in very close proximity with the wet riser (this is the vertical shaft within the office building where all the water pipes and soil stacks/waste pipes run), or backing onto the WCs (or both).  Although it is usually possible to run new water pipes and waste pipes through the office, it is often costly and impractical to do so. Moreover, the landlord might not like the idea and prevent you from doing so.

So, before signing a lease, the crucial aspect to check is that there is an existing functional water feed and waste pipe present in the office suite. If there is not, you should get the landlord to agree (to be written into the Heads of Terms / Lease) to provide the plumbing and to foot the bill for it so that it is ready for your own kitchen fitter to connect to when you occupy the office.  Ideally, the water should be suitable for drinking, and a hot as well as cold water feed is highly desirable.  If you do not have this facility, it will be up to your own contractor to find a way to plumb into the buildings main services and this could turn out to be very complex and very costly.  Remember, the landlord has the right to refuse any works that have not been agreed prior to occupation.

If these services (water/waste) are present, but you want the kitchen to be situated in a different part of the office, additional pipework will need to be run from that point back to the services that the landlord has provided.  If the office has a raised access floor, the water supply is not usually such an issue as it can be served within flexible hoses that run within the void, although care should be taken to isolate / separate the water pipes from electrical and data services that  also run beneath the floor which feed floor boxes etc. The waste pipe can be somewhat more complicated depending on distances and the layout of the office. The pipe must be set at an inclined angle so that the water can drain naturally via gravity. If this is not possible, then more often than not, the drainage pipe will need to be raised to a higher level and a waste water pump installed. This will mean concealing the pipework above a suspended grid or MF ceiling, or  running it along the walls and boxing it in in order to keep conceal exposed pipework.  All of this is usually achievable, but it simply adds (sometimes considerably) to the cost.

If hot water is required and a hot water supply is not available direct from the building’s main services, it will be necessary to fit an electric under-sink water heater .