Office partitioning and fit-out in Nairobi

Office work is the highest-value thing on this site per job and among the lowest in search volume, which tells you something about how it gets bought. office partitioning measures 110 searches a month in Kenya, and carries the most expensive advertising cost of any term we track for this trade. A handful of people are looking, and each one is worth finding.

What it costs

Gypsum partitioning runs about KES 2,000 to 8,000 per square metre depending on specification: single or double skin, insulation, acoustic performance and whether the partition goes to the underside of the slab or stops at a suspended ceiling. A full office fit-out at Nairobi rates lands around KES 700,000 to 2 million for a typical floor plate, which is the largest ticket of any work on this site.

Premium fit-out is a different market again. The only benchmark we could find for it is an international cost index quoting about USD 1,329 per square metre for premium Nairobi office fit-out. We have left that in dollars deliberately rather than converting it, because converting a foreign index and presenting the result as a Kenyan price is how misleading numbers get into circulation.

Most of this work is not won through search

Worth being straightforward about. Substantial fit-out is procured through a specification: an architect or designer draws it, a quantity surveyor prices it into a bill of quantities, and joinery packages get tendered against that document. Nobody searches for it.

What search does bring is the smaller end, and it is real work: a company partitioning two meeting rooms out of an open floor, a growing practice that needs a reception desk and six workstations, a shop being fitted before a lease starts.

So this page has two jobs. It converts that smaller work directly, and it exists so that a facilities manager or a QS checking us out finds something that reads like a contractor rather than a brochure.

What we do

• Partitioning in gypsum, timber stud or glazed frames, to slab or to ceiling.
• Meeting and board rooms, where the acoustic detail matters more than the finish. A partition that stops at a suspended ceiling transmits every word over the top of it, and that is the commonest complaint about a new meeting room.
• Reception desks, which are one-off joinery rather than a product, and the most visible thing in an office.
• Workstations and storage walls, specified for commercial use. A drawer opened thirty times a day is not a domestic drawer.
• Tea points and kitchenettes, which take more abuse than a home kitchen and should be built accordingly.
• Shop and retail fitting, where the programme usually matters more than anything else because the lease is already running.

Working around a live office

Almost every office job happens in a building somebody is using. That means the programme is built around the constraints rather than the other way round: booked service lifts, agreed working hours, dust containment, and noisy work sequenced into whatever window the building allows. In Westlands and Upper Hill that window is often narrow.

We would rather quote against the real hours and take longer than quote against a fiction and be stopped on the second morning.

What we will state in writing

The scope, and what is excluded. Electrical and data containment, HVAC alterations, sprinkler modifications and statutory approvals are frequently outside a joinery package, and a quotation that does not say so is not cheaper, it is unfinished. On a commercial job those exclusions are where the disputes come from.