Key plans and tiles

Every Woodfine Building is planned from the furniture out, not from a floor-plate area formula in. A leasehold arrives with its light, circulation, and ventilation already proven at three nested scales — the Key Plan, the Tile, and the Floor Plate — so no building is sized larger than the accommodation it was designed to hold.

The Key Plan

The Key Plan is the smallest unit of space worth leasing: a room-scale plan sized from real furniture placement, real circulation, and real daylight access, rather than from a generic area-per-person allowance. Most Key Plans resolve into three zones moving in from the building face — a daylight zone where desks or workstations sit within reach of natural light, a flexible interior zone used for storage or depth that varies by tenant category, and a circulation zone. Private Office Key Plans are the one documented exception: they carry no separate circulation zone of their own, opening directly onto the building's shared corridor instead. Key Plan sizes vary by professional tenant category — private office, laboratory, medical, academic, business, and civic space each have their own range, from single-office suites up to large civic assemblies.

The Tile

Key Plans combine into Tiles. A Tile is a block of Key Plans that does double duty: it is the unit a tenant actually leases, and it is the single climate-services zone the building's mechanical systems are sized to — every Key Plan sharing a Tile shares that Tile's own heating, cooling, and ventilation zone. Not every Key Plan fits every Tile; at building corners and around elevator lobbies, smaller purpose-built configurations fill space that a standard Tile would not fit efficiently. Two development classes — Retail Select and Tech Industrial — skip the Tile level entirely: Key Plans in those classes compose directly into Floor Plates.

The Floor Plate

The Floor Plate is the fixed floor plate a Woodfine Building's structural grid is built around: Tiles plus the building's core — the shared elevator lobbies, stairs, mechanical rooms, and washrooms every Floor Plate carries regardless of tenant mix.

Nesting Without Remainder

Key Plans nest into Tiles, and Tiles nest into Floor Plates, without leaving unaccounted space at any level — but not by simple addition. Where a clean sum would leave a gap or an overhang, smaller purpose-built configurations absorb the difference, the same way Special Tiles absorb the odd geometry at a building corner. A prospective tenant is selecting from a defined set of geometrically complete configurations at every scale, not requesting a custom partition arrangement after the fact.

Self-Similar, Not Repeating

The same nesting logic repeats at every scale of the hierarchy — a Key Plan nests into a Tile the same way a Tile nests into a Floor Plate — which is what makes the system self-similar. It is not, however, periodic: the sequence of Key Plans and Tiles along any one floor is set by the actual tenant mix on that floor, not by a repeating grid. Because Key Plan widths vary by tenant category rather than following one fixed module, a single Floor Plate can offer meaningfully more distinct leasehold size combinations than a floor built from one uniform unit repeated to fill the space — real optionality for a prospective tenant, not a marketing description of flexibility.

Where the Specification Lives

The full Key Plan catalog, Tile-type definitions, current dimensions, and the composition rules governing how they combine are maintained directly at bim.woodfinegroup.com.

See also

• Geometry of Sustainability — the operating-cost and construction-volume consequences that follow from this same geometry
• BIM Design Philosophy — why this system is built on open standards rather than a proprietary one
• Design sequence priority — why Key Plans and Tiles is fixed before Building Services and Structural design begin
• Common Building Code — the washroom-provisioning standard built into the Key Plan by tenant category
• Tile-level climate zoning — how each Tile carries its own climate zone
• Structural bay depth discipline — why the structural grid follows the Tile, not the reverse
• Fixed floor plates — the Floor Plate dimensions this system derives
• BOMA standard — how Key Plan and Tile boundaries relate to BOMA measurement conventions