Modular Seating: Build the Breakout You Actually Need
Modular office seating is the one category where the brochure photo and the thing that turns up can be the same product and still look nothing alike. The photo shows a ten seater island under an atrium. You have a corner by the kitchen. Both are the same modules, and the difference is entirely in how you put them together.
That is the point of buying modular instead of a fixed sofa, and it is also where people go wrong. The set looks like one object online, so it gets bought like one, and the flexibility that justified the price never gets used. Here is how I would plan it.
Start with the modules, not the picture
Every set in our modular seating range is built from a short list of parts: straight seats, curved seats, corners, and end pieces with or without an arm. The Mawsley L-shaped corner sofa set is a seven seater on the page, but what you are really buying is two runs of straight modules meeting at a corner piece, with a choice of arms on both sides, left only or right only. Pick the arm to suit which wall the sofa runs along, and it fits the corner rather than fighting it.
The Brixworth modular seating unit goes further and sells the parts individually: a central unit, a corner, a left end and a right end, each between 66cm and 79cm wide and 11kg to 14kg, so one person can move them. Six of those make a sofa this month and a pair of facing benches next month. One customer told us they had already run theirs through three layouts as the space changed, which is exactly what the format is for.
Corners, power and the bits people forget
A corner module does two jobs. It joins two runs, and it decides whether the set faces inwards for a conversation or outwards for people passing through. Booths and islands are the extreme versions of each. The Mawsley circular booth faces in around a central table in black or white and gives you a meeting spot with no meeting room. The Mawsley capsule island faces out, seats eight or ten, and takes a low or high back depending on whether you want it to screen the space behind it.
Power modules are an option on all of the Mawsley sets, and my advice is to add them before you think you need them. Nobody sits on a sofa without a laptop any more, and the only thing sadder than a breakout area with no sockets is one with an extension lead taped across the floor. Order the power at the same time as the seating, because retrofitting it later means the set coming apart again.
The rest of the checklist is short. In order:
Measure the corner, not the room. The Mawsley L-shape needs 236cm to 252cm along each wall, and that includes the arms.
Decide who faces whom. Inward for teams that talk, outward for a reception or a corridor.
Pick a seat height to match the tables you already own. Mawsley seats sit at 46cm, the Brixworth unit at 42cm.
Choose fabric last. The Mawsley comes in ten Camira Era colourways, the Brixworth in 24 across four collections, and the swatches match the delivered fabric, so choose from the swatch rather than the photo.
Leave room to change your mind
Modular sets are made to order and take ten to fifteen working days, which the product page tells you before you commit. That is longer than a stock sofa, and the trade is a set that can be taken apart and reused when the office changes. If the layout is genuinely settled and nobody will ever move it, a fixed sofa from our office sofas and soft seating range is cheaper and arrives sooner. I would rather say that than sell you flexibility you will never use.
If you do go modular, buy one spare straight module. It is the cheapest insurance in the range, and the day a department grows by two people you will be glad of it. Anything at this end of the catalogue sits on our office furniture over £1,000 page, where the corner sets and islands live alongside the bench desks they usually get bought with.
The frame on every Mawsley and Brixworth set carries a ten year guarantee, with five years on the fabric and foam. Given how much use a breakout sofa takes compared with the chairs around it, that is the number I would look at first, and it is on every spec table.
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Picks the ranges and knows which chair suits which back.