Can I Design or Customize a Mobile Office?

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The prefabricated construction, utilitarian function and boxlike form of mobile offices have given them an undeserved reputation similar to Pete Seeger’s critique of little boxes on the hillside: “And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.”

 

In terms of interior layout and expansion possibilities, mobile offices are actually more malleable than you may think — offering a high degree of customization to meet the diverse needs of customers. “We modify every unit to meet the customer’s specification,” said Troy Hudson of Container Technology, Inc. of Morrow, Ga. “The standard office layouts are more of a guideline.”

 

Elliott of Peterborough, England, offers a broad selection of configurations in its Steelclad portable office line. This line includes a basic open floor plan that lets the client put a desk here, a table there, and a PowerPoint presentation setup anywhere there’s ample wall space for a screen. Configurations to accommodate bathrooms, dressing rooms, food-stands, etc. are available as well, according to Elliott.

 

If you need more space, then you could interlink two or three office trailers with partitions, connecting doors, and a “link-way” that strings two or more offices together perpendicularly as a cross-corridor. This lets users pass safely from trailer to trailer and open a door on either side of the corridor to whichever half of the trailer they wish to enter. In effect, this allows for two separate office spaces in a single trailer.

 

This configuration offers infinite possibilities for expansion, depending on how much ground area is on hand for your mobile office, according to Elliott. Mobile offices are stackable as well, courtesy of Elliott’s Moduflex office complex system that can create office spaces up to three stories high — more like office buildings than trailers!

 

A prime example of mobile office customization is the double-trailer configuration set up by ModSpace of Boston for Super Tours LLC as a passenger waiting room for its Super Duck “Splash” tours of the Boston Harbor. “We had to put together two trailers and take out their side walls to build a 40-by-20-foot room,” said Marc Dube, group sales and customer service manager at Super Tours. “We have enough seating for 49 passengers, equal to the capacity of the [duck boat] vehicles. We designed the location so you can accommodate two vehicles at the same time.”

This spatial reconfiguration also gave the waiting room ample space for vending machines, a refrigerator for employees, security cameras, ladies’ and men’s rooms, and an office alcove for monitoring the GPS of incoming passenger trolleys. On the outside of the double trailer, Super Tours was able to build a custom boarding deck for two duck boats along one exterior wall, ADA-compliant ramps to the deck and a custom double-door entrance on the opposite wall, and a food-vending station.