10 Creative Conference Room Names to Inspire Your Workplace

Most offices have a room everyone calls "the big one" or "the one by the kitchen" regardless of its actual name. That's a naming failure, and it's more common than it should be. Picking good conference room names is a small project with an outsized payoff -- but only if you approach it with a plan rather than a brainstorm.

Start With a Theme, Not a List of Names

The biggest mistake companies make is skipping straight to name suggestions. Someone sends a Slack message asking "what should we name the conference rooms?" and within an hour you have 47 unrelated suggestions ranging from "Everest" to "The Thunderdome."

A theme does the hard work for you. It gives you a built-in constraint that makes every individual name easier to pick, easier to remember, and easier to extend when you add new rooms later.

Good themes share three qualities:

1. They generate enough names. If you have 12 rooms and your theme only produces 8 obvious options, you'll end up forcing the last four. Pick a theme with more material than you need.
2. They connect to something real about your company. A travel startup naming rooms after destinations makes immediate sense. A fintech company doing the same thing just has random city names.
3. They produce names people can actually say and spell. A Greek mythology theme sounds sophisticated until half the office can't pronounce "Mnemosyne" and just calls it "that room on the third floor."

How to Pick Your Theme

Rather than listing every possible theme (cities, movies, scientists, mountains -- you've seen those lists), here's the process that actually works.

Step 1: Look at what your team already references. Pay attention to the shared vocabulary in your office. Do people quote movies constantly? Are there running jokes about specific topics? Is your company's origin story tied to a particular place? The best themes come from culture that already exists rather than culture you're trying to manufacture.

Step 2: Count your rooms and plan for growth. A theme needs to scale. If you have 6 rooms today but might have 15 next year after an office expansion, your theme needs to support that. "Planets in our solar system" runs out fast. "National parks" gives you hundreds.

Step 3: Test the names out loud. Before committing, try saying "I booked us in [name] at 2pm" for each room. If the name feels awkward in a sentence, it'll get replaced with an informal nickname within weeks. Short, punchy names survive. Long or obscure ones don't.

Step 4: Check for unintended meanings. Run your names past a diverse group before finalizing. A name that seems harmless to one group might carry different connotations for another. This is especially important in international offices.

Companies That Got It Right

The most cited examples are worth examining not for their specific names, but for why the themes work.

Airbnb names rooms after real listings on its platform. The theme directly connects to the product. New rooms are easy to add because there are millions of listings to choose from. And the names remind employees of what they're building every time they book a meeting.

Slack uses stops along the Pacific Crest Trail. The theme ties their offices together geographically, scales well (the trail has plenty of named locations), and reflects the company's West Coast roots.

What these have in common: the themes weren't picked to impress outsiders. They mean something to the people who use the rooms every day. That's the standard worth aiming for.

Themes to Avoid

A few categories that sound good in a brainstorm but cause problems in practice:

• Abstract concepts ("Innovation," "Synergy," "Excellence"). They're indistinguishable from each other and feel corporate rather than personal.
• Themes that require explanation (obscure historical references, deep-cut pop culture). If a new hire needs a footnote to understand the name, it's not working.
• Themes tied to a single person's passion. The CEO loves Formula 1 so all rooms are named after racetracks? That says more about office politics than company culture.
• Anything with a natural ranking. Room names like "Gold," "Silver," and "Bronze" or "Premier" and "Standard" create an unintentional hierarchy. People will assume "Gold" is the best room and fight over booking it.

Beyond the Name: Making It Stick

A name on a door isn't enough. For room names to actually become part of how people talk about the office, you need to reinforce them.

Put the names in your room scheduling system so they show up on calendar invites. Add small design touches -- a framed photo, a relevant quote, a color scheme -- that connect to each name. If your theme is national parks, hang a photo of each park in its corresponding room.

The goal is that someone walking past a room can guess its name from the visual cues alone. That's when the names stop being labels and become part of the space.

A Few Rooms That Deserve Different Treatment

Not every room needs a themed name. Specialty spaces like mother's rooms, prayer rooms, or wellness rooms should be labeled clearly and descriptively. People looking for these spaces need to find them quickly and without ambiguity. "Serenity" might fit your naming theme, but "Wellness Room" is what someone actually needs to see on the sign.

Phone booths and one-person focus rooms also benefit from simple numbering rather than themed names. You don't need to name 20 identical phone booths after 20 different mountains. "Phone Booth 1-20" works fine.

The Payoff

Good room names do more than look nice on a floor plan. They make the office easier to navigate, give people a shared vocabulary for talking about spaces, and send a quiet signal to visitors about who you are as a company. They also make meetings marginally more pleasant, which -- across hundreds of meetings a year -- adds up.

The naming project itself can be a useful team exercise too. Letting employees vote on a theme or suggest names gives people a small sense of ownership over the space they work in. That matters more than most workplace initiatives that cost ten times as much.

Once you've picked out names for your meeting rooms, you'll want a system to manage bookings and availability. WOX's room booking solution makes it easy to see which rooms are free, book recurring meetings, and keep everything organized -- so your beautifully named rooms actually get used.