The paper presents a sample design of a multi-storey building with respect to the fire safety. Three design strategies are examined, a standard solution according to the requirements, a fire safety engineering design without a sprinkler system and finally a fire safety engineering design with a sprinkler system. The objective was to demonstrate different design strategies and still comply with the performance based Swedish building regulation. Mostly, only the safety to people has been considered in the design for the three cases. The use of fire safety engineering methods for the design shows that an optimised solution can be achieved with respect to both fire safety and economics.