When Sylvia Courtney walks into a greenhouse project, she’s thinking about something many operators overlook until it’s too late: how many steps it takes to move through the space, day after day, year after year.
As VP of Design at LLK and a horticulturist by training, Courtney has spent decades watching growers struggle with layouts that looked good on paper but cost them thousands in wasted labor.
Her philosophy is: “It’s always more costly to try to change layout after the fact than to have thought about it from the beginning.”
Here are six critical design decisions that should happen in your initial planning discussions (before it becomes expensive to fix them).
1. Create Uniform Growing Blocks
The math matters more than you might think. When production planning and inventory time rolls around, irregular growing areas create unnecessary complexity.
“When we create uniform growing blocks, it takes less time to do the production planning,” Courtney explains. “When you’ve got 15 different-sized growing blocks or areas, you have to do a whole lot more math to manage it.”
In addition to a more streamlined appearance, this will reduce cognitive load and calculation time for your team.
2. Design for Maintenance Access, Not Just Production Space
Courtney has seen it countless times: benches placed directly in front of fans, pad systems, or other equipment that requires regular service.
“If a bench is right in front of the fan, it’s not ever going to get maintenance done because the maintenance team is not going to move the bench,” she notes.
This results in deferred maintenance that eventually costs far more than the production space was worth.
She recalls one example early in her career: “There was a bench with cactus on it right in front of the fan, and the motor had to be changed, so we had to climb up on the bench [and] move all those cactus off of the bench.”
The principle extends beyond benches. Even conduit placement matters: horizontal runs that block access to shade systems can turn a simple maintenance task into an expensive ordeal.
3. Get Aisle Width Right From Day One
This is where Courtney sees the most resistance. Operators hate spending money on space that doesn’t grow plants. But inadequate aisles create a hidden tax on every task.
“If the aisle is not wide enough and people have to turn sideways to walk down the aisle, it slows them down,” she says, recalling a facility where workers were constantly knocking plants off benches.
The width requirements depend on your operation. You need to consider the turning radius for carts, safety requirements, and whether multiple people need to pass each other. One institutional client required aisles wide enough for lift access, raising the aisle-to-bench ratio but ensuring safe maintenance practices.
Commercial operations often push for tighter spaces, but there’s a trade-off: “That just means it may cost them a little more labor because they’re going to have to move things for us to get in there to do maintenance.”
4. Plan Drain Placement Strategically
Drains rarely make it into early design conversations, but they should. Poor placement creates daily inefficiencies and potential biosecurity risks.
“A lot of debris collects in that drain, and at some point, they’re going to [get clogged]. The drain should have some sort of a basket that would be removable so you can clean it out. And if it’s under a bench, somebody’s probably not ever going to get under there to do it,” Courtney explains.
Beyond accessibility, drains need to be positioned for evaporative pad system bleed-off and require a proper floor slope. Getting this right requires coordination between multiple systems, which is why it needs to happen during initial planning.
5. Keep Corridors Clear for Airflow
Corridors aren’t storage areas, but you wouldn’t know it from what Courtney has observed in the field.
“The biggest thing I’ve seen often is growers using the corridor as a storage facility, and they’re placing pallets of soil right in front of the intake for the pad systems,” she says.
Some facilities even place potting benches in corridors, where dust gets sucked into the cooling system.
Anything blocking airflow — whether it’s equipment, supplies, or tall plants — will reduce cooling efficiency and system performance.
6. Design for Future Automation (Even If You’re Not Ready Yet)
Automated systems require significantly more space than traditional setups, space that doesn’t directly produce revenue. This creates natural resistance, but retrofitting is far more expensive.
“That challenge [of automation] is doing that as a retrofit. You need to allow adequate space if they’re going to do that,” Courtney notes.
Autonomous systems need buffer zones, adequate turning radius, and contingency space in case equipment stops mid-route.
She’s seen clients want to add automation mid-project: “Now is not the time. The time to have made this decision was six months ago. Right? Because now it would just be really costly to change that.”
The Payoff Comes in Phases
One cannabis client demonstrates how early planning decisions prove their value over time. After completing their first phase with maximum bench space and minimal aisles, they experienced the labor inefficiency firsthand.
When they moved to later phases, “they realized the labor inefficiency by having a higher bench square footage to aisle square footage. And when we went into the future phase, they took out a bench to improve the labor efficiency.”
They sacrificed production space to gain back labor efficiency, exactly what Courtney had warned about from the beginning.
Start With the End in Mind
“Labor is such a costly and challenging situation for growers,” Courtney says. Her approach focuses on reducing steps, creating uniformity, and designing spaces that work with your team instead of against them.
There is a common thread through all six design decisions: They’re nearly impossible to fix affordably after construction. But get them right early, and they pay dividends in saved labor hours, better maintenance, and smoother operations for the entire life of your facility.
As Courtney puts it, these considerations “really should be a part of the initial discussion because everything we need to do in that space hinges on that. And so that’s where I start.”
Sylvia Courtney is VP of Design at LLK, where she specializes in reverse engineering workflow into greenhouse design. With a background in horticulture and decades of industry experience, she helps operators create facilities that prioritize long-term labor efficiency.
