Fitted Suite or Your Own Fit-Out: How to Choose

A fitted suite hands you a finished office and hands you someone else's decisions. It is faster and lighter on capital; what it costs you is fit, because the layout was designed for a tenant who does not exist. 5 questions settle it — and the one that outlives the choice is the reinstatement clause, which does not automatically follow whoever paid for the works.

Cat A is the landlord's base build. Cat B is your fit-out. Cat A+ is the landlord's fit-out, delivered ready to occupy — and for small Central London floorplates it is now an ordinary product rather than an exception.

What an office fit-out costs prices the Cat B route and sets out what sits inside the rate, and how we deliver commercial fit-out covers the work itself. This page is the question that comes before both: should you be buying a fit-out at all?

The trade, stated plainly

Neither is the smart answer. The mistake is choosing on capital alone, because capital is the one number both parties will quote you and it is the one that tells you least about the next five years.

The five questions that settle it

One: how long is the term?

The single biggest input, and the one most often skipped. A fit-out amortised over ten years is a different proposition from the same fit-out over three. Short term with break options points hard at fitted. A long commitment makes the capital argument for a fit-out much easier.

Two: does the space have to do something specific?

A general office is a solved problem, and a generic suite solves it competently. A lab, a studio, a client-facing reception, heavy AV, an unusual acoustic requirement — none of those are solved generically, and no fitted suite will have anticipated them.

Three: what shape is your team, actually?

Not headcount. Shape. A team in three days a week needs more meeting space and fewer desks than the five-day desk-per-person model most speculative suites are built on. Count the meetings you cannot hold today, not the seats.

Four: what is the rent doing?

The landlord's fit-out cost is recovered somewhere, and it is normally the rent. Compare total cost across the term, with the rent-free position for both scenarios in writing. A fitted suite at a higher rent can be better value or considerably worse, and the capital figure alone cannot tell you which.

Five: who reinstates, and to what?

The one that outlives the decision, and the one to settle before signing. What a schedule of dilapidations actually is covers what arrives at the end of the lease, and why the decisions that produced it are years old by then.

Approved Documents are statutory guidance to the Building Regulations 2010 for England. Compliance is judged against the Requirements in Schedule 1; the Approved Document shows one way of meeting them. Your building control body has the final word on your specific building.

The sentence to get in writing before you sign

That the landlord's fit-out is the landlord's, and stays. It sounds obvious: they installed it, they paid for it. But yield-up clauses have required tenants to return premises to Cat A condition including elements they never installed, and the statutory cap in s.18(1) is about repair — it does not directly cap a reinstatement claim. Inheriting a fitted suite without inheriting that paperwork is how a tenant ends up liable to strip out a fit-out they did not choose, did not pay for, and could not have altered without permission.

Before you sign either way

1. 01Get the yield-up clause and the licence, and read them together. The lease says what condition the premises come back in. The Licence to Alter, if there is one, says what happens to the alterations. They are different documents and they are frequently inconsistent.
2. 02Establish in writing who owns the fitted elements. If the space came fitted, get it stated that the landlord's fit-out is theirs and stays. This is a sentence, it costs nothing at heads of terms, and it is close to impossible to fix later.
3. 03Get a schedule of condition, photographed and dated, attached to the lease. True for a fitted suite as much as a shell. Without one the repairing covenant is read against the building the lease describes rather than the one you found — and a fitted suite has far more surfaces to argue about.
4. 04Compare total cost over the term, not capital. Rent, rent-free, service charge, the fit-out capital and the reinstatement provision at the end. Both options, same basis, on one page. Most comparisons omit the last item entirely, and it is the one that arrives when there is no budget left.
5. 05Test the layout against your actual week. Walk the suite with your calendar open. How many meetings could you have held here last week, and where would the people who came in have sat? A generic layout fails specifically, not generally.
6. 06Ask what altering it would take. Qualified or absolute covenant, and what consent has historically cost in that building. If the answer is difficult, the suite you are seeing is the suite you are getting for the whole term.

Why a builder is writing this

Because the honest answer is often "take the fitted suite", and that is a job we do not get.

We build commercial fit-out in occupied and operational buildings — retail on Sloane Street, Cat A and Cat B works inside the V&A's Europe 1600–1815 galleries. What that work teaches is that a fit-out earns its money when the space has to do something a generic layout cannot, and that when it does not, the capital is better left in the business.

2VP is the builder, not a marketplace: one contract, one named project lead, and no introducer fee stacked on the build cost. If a fitted suite fits how you work, say so and keep the money. If it does not, the fit-out is worth doing properly — and what one costs sets out what sits inside the rate before anyone tenders it.

The one line to take away

Choose on fit and term, not on capital. Then get one sentence in writing: whose fit-out it is, and what has to come out at the end.