Seven bays, and eight feet of nothing
Ninety-six feet of wall, six inch walls at both ends and between every bay, and a twelve foot target. The division looks like eight bays and it is seven, because seven bays plus six dividing walls plus two end walls comes to eighty-eight feet and there is no room for the eighth. What is left is eight feet of frontage that produces no rent, which at the default depth and rate is $3,344 a year of nothing.
The fix is not to build another wall. It is to move the lines. Seven bays sharing the whole frontage come out at 13.14 feet each rather than twelve, the walls and doors are identical, nothing extra is built, and the rent goes up by that same $3,344 a year. The only thing that changed is that the plan stopped insisting on a round number.
The eighth bay does not pay
Eight bays do fit, at 11.44 feet each, which is above the nine foot minimum. They let less floor. The eighth wall takes another six inches out of the frontage, so the lettable area drops from 1,748 square feet to 1,739 — nine and a half feet of floor gone — and at the default rate that is $209 a year worse. Getting there costs an extra $4,535 in wall and fit-out.
Read that carefully, because the table will not stop there: at one flat rate per square foot, six bays let more floor than seven and one undivided run would let more than anything. Every wall you do not build is floor you get back. So the row comparison you can actually trust is the one where only the lines moved and the wall count stayed the same — seven at twelve feet against seven widened. Comparing across bay counts is a question about demand, not arithmetic: narrow bays usually let for more per square foot and find takers faster, and seven rents are steadier than four. This page models none of that, and says so rather than pretending the flat rate settles it.
Depth is the multiplier nobody adjusts
Every foot of frontage is worth the bay depth in square feet, so the corridor decision is larger than it looks. Take the corridor from five feet to six and every bay loses a foot of depth: at the defaults that is seven bays losing 13.14 square feet each, ninety-two square feet in total, just over two thousand dollars a year. It is the same money as the dead strip, arriving from a decision that gets made on a completely different basis.
None of which is an argument for a narrow corridor. What a route has to be is set by the code the building department enforces, by your lease and by what the space actually has to carry, and this page supplies no figure and states no rule. It is an argument for knowing what the dimension costs before it is chosen, so that the conversation is about the right thing.
Then the questions that are not arithmetic
Dividing a floor and putting separate people in the parts raises questions this page deliberately does not touch. Whether the space may be divided, whether it may be occupied by separate tenants or licensees, what the dividing construction has to be, what happens to routes out of the building, and how any of it lands with your lease and your insurance are decided by your building department, your landlord, your insurer and a lawyer, and they differ by where you are. If the bays are workshops with machines in them, the supervision and insurance side of people using equipment nobody trained them on is a separate matter again, and it is not one arithmetic settles.
On the money, the load factor calculator covers the rentable and usable arithmetic on the other side of the same wall, the cost allocation calculator divides the utility bills once the bays are occupied, and the sublease carry calculator handles the case where the space you are dividing is space you lease yourself. For desks rather than demised bays, the desk layout calculator packs the open version of the same floor.
Questions people ask
Why do I get one fewer bay than the division suggests?
Because the dividing walls take frontage that the division ignores. Seven twelve foot bays are eighty-four feet of bay, but they also need six walls between them and, at the defaults, two more at the ends — another four feet. Ninety-six feet of run is eighty-eight feet consumed and eight feet spare, which is not another twelve foot bay. The thicker the wall and the narrower the bay, the bigger this effect gets, and at six inch walls and eight foot bays the walls are taking a full bay out of every seventeen.
Should I add the extra bay or widen the ones I have?
Widening is free money and the table proves it: same walls, same doors, nothing built, and at the defaults $3,344 a year more rent because the dead strip stops being dead. Adding a bay is a different question. It costs a wall, a fit-out and half a foot of frontage taken off every bay, so at one flat rate per square foot it always lets slightly less floor — at the defaults, $209 a year less for $4,535 of build. The only reason to build it is that eight narrower bays might let for more per foot, or let faster, or spread your risk over more tenants, and that is a judgement about your own demand rather than something this arithmetic can decide.
What should I use for the wall cost?
Your own quotes, per linear foot at the depth you are actually building, all in — framing, board both sides, finish, and the labour to stand it up. Do not use a figure per square foot of wall unless you multiply it out yourself, because the depth of the bay is doing that multiplication here. Whatever the wall has to be built of, and whether anything more is required of a wall between two separate occupancies, is set by the code your building department enforces, so get the specification settled before you price it.
Does this tell me how many people can be in each bay?
No, and nothing on this page touches that. How many people may occupy a space, what routes out it needs and how wide they must be are set by the code your building department enforces and by the terms of your lease. Every dimension here — the corridor, the wall, the bay width — is one you typed in, and the page supplies none of them and states no rule. If the layout is going anywhere near a permit, those figures come from the authority that will review it, not from a calculator.
Can I use this for storage units or workshop bays rather than studios?
The geometry works for anything divided along a run: storage bays, workshop bays, market stalls, self-storage corridors. The economics work too, as long as your rate per square foot is a figure you can actually evidence for that kind of space rather than a hope. What changes with the use is everything outside the arithmetic — a bay full of machinery raises supervision, ventilation and insurance questions that a bay full of canvases does not, and those get settled with your insurer and your building department rather than here.