The practice

Where workplace
and digital really connect.

Global Workplace Advisors designs and delivers high-performance work environments across EMEA. Two founders, more than twenty experts, three hubs, and a software company of our own.

01Origin

We started on the side
of the table you are on.

Twenty years of international fit-out taught us the same lesson on every continent: the strategy is rarely the problem. The problem is what happens to it once it leaves the deck. It gets redrawn by someone who was not in the workshops, priced by someone who did not read the drawings, and delivered to people nobody prepared.

So we built a practice with no handover points in it. The team that counts your desks is the team that draws the plan and the team that hands you the keys. And when the tooling we needed did not exist, we built that too.

2004Practising since
20+Experts across EMEA
15Countries served
3Hubs, Paris · Beirut · Dubai
02Founders
Two disciplines. One practice.

One of us imagines it.
The other makes it hold.

Mohamed Sahily and Maya Salah in the studio, in front of the People plus Place equals Impact wall

We make the People + Place equation work.

Mohamed Sahily · Maya Salah Co-founders

Ten years ago we started working on the same problem from opposite ends. One of us reads the organisation and draws what it needs. The other turns that intention into something that can be measured, built and operated. Neither half stands alone, and that is why we have never separated the design from the delivery.

Mohamed Sahily Co-founder · Architecture & workplace

Licensed architect, École d'architecture de Marne-la-Vallée. HEC and INSEAD. Twenty years of workplace projects across EMEA for global corporate real estate teams. Works on what a building asks of an organisation, and on the leadership conversation that has to happen before a single wall moves.

Maya Salah Co-founder · Digital & delivery

Computer science engineer, Master MIAGE, Université Paris Descartes. Fifteen years on large enterprise programmes in energy, telecom and media, as business analyst and then product owner: requirements, backlog, delivery, acceptance. Certified Scrum Product Owner. She brings the method and the data that turn a workplace decision into something you can defend, plan and hand over. Works in French, Arabic and English across the three hubs.

More than twenty experts Europe · Middle East · Africa

Hired one at a time around the two of us, to take bright ideas all the way to a place people actually work in. Workplace consultants, designers, project managers and site teams, based in the markets they deliver in.

03Tools
spacefit.ai · built by us, for us

We were tired of waiting
three weeks for a test-fit.
So we built the tool.

Global Workplace Advisors is the majority shareholder behind spacefit.ai. Every option we put in front of you is generated, costed and compared on the same engine. That is why our proposals arrive with alternatives rather than a single scheme you are invited to approve.

Hours, not weeks

Upload a plan, get viable layouts the same day. The time saved goes into the part that needs a human: deciding which one is right for your organisation.

Cutlines that hold up

The algorithm slices a floor plate into tenancies that actually work: circulation, means of escape, daylight and core access respected, not approximated.

Scenarios you can defend

Every option carries its real numbers: m² per person, sharing ratio, settings mix, capital cost. The board conversation stops being a matter of taste.

Owning the tool also means the method is ours. When a question comes up that the software cannot answer yet, we change the software.

04Conduct

Four things we do
whether or not you ask.

  • We measure before we drawNo layout leaves this office without the occupancy evidence behind it. If the data does not exist, we say so and we go and collect it.
  • We tell you what we choseEvery ratio, every distance, every settings decision is a choice someone made. You get the reasoning, not just the drawing.
  • We stay after handoverPost-occupancy evaluation at three and twelve months is part of the engagement, not an upsell. It is also how we get better.
  • We do not sell furnitureNo distribution agreement with any manufacturer. The specification answers to your ratios and your budget, and to nothing else.

Tell us what the space
is supposed to do.

Not how many desks. What it is supposed to do. Everything else follows from that.

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