If you aren’t working in a cubicle and don’t need to conform to standard office-furniture designs, you can embrace a design aesthetic that suits you. Whether your taste runs to contemporary or classical, try to outfit your office space with elements that are appealing to you and inspire you to get the job done. Even a small home-office space that needs to double as a shared his-and-hers den can be well organized for the workday and then transition into a comfortable after-work aerie if all the elements are in the right place.
Draw a line in the sand between comfortable and corporate. Before racing out to buy an oversized “executive” desk without any personality or soul, why not think about how you work, when you work, and what you really need. In the digital age, most of us have far less paper, work on a laptop, and need less desk space than those who handle masses of paper and documents daily. Start by making a list of all the things you want your office to have, and see if it’s possible to balance priorities and scale to fit it all in.
Match your metal tones and create unity amongst a collection of distinctly different furniture pieces by replating the handles and hardware. If you’re trying to mix new with vintage and struggling with different metal finishes, you can remove the old knobs and have them replated for about $10 per piece in your choice of finish. It’s a terrific way to update an inexpensive desk find and make it look au courant.
There’s no rule that dictates the use of only one fabric on a piece of upholstered furniture. When torn between two great fabrics, I try to use both! Covering the frames of the chaises in plush chenille makes them soft and inviting, while choosing prewashed linen for the seat cushions makes them practical and easy to care for. Piping the frames of the chaises in the seat fabric ties the scheme together and accentuates the streamlined silhouette.
By being practical and honest about how you’ll use the room, you may realize that your little office is not where you’ll be entertaining friends and family, so there’s no need for seating to accommodate four to six people. If two is all you expect, a pair of luxurious chaise longues that invite you to veg out at the end of a long day (or just recline during a long phone call) are an unexpected and creative furniture solution.
If you don’t need to dedicate the entire room to office furniture, you can carve out that ideal work/life balance by incorporating a den/lounge focus into the mix. By ensuring that all the support pieces offer extra storage (such as side tables with drawers, a media console with doors and a shelf, or a desk with ample drawer storage), you’ll be able to store lots of books and documents, yet your workspace will still look organized and efficient.
The addition of decorative fabrics and elegant wallpaper helps add another element of differentiation between the banal cubicle “environment” and the personalized workplace that will inspire your best work every day!
Cove ceilings make paint choices tricky, as they blur the line between walls and ceilings. Adding a trim profile around the perimeter of the room allows you to delineate which areas you want to treat as walls and which ones become ceiling. Installing the trim band about five feet above the floor creates the opportunity to install decorative wallpaper below and a pretty paint colour above.
If your office has a closet, you can easily turn it into valuable space for customized storage solutions. By removing the standard clothes-hanging rod and replacing it with wooden shelves and dividers (painted in a snazzy colour scheme to complement the room), you can carve out a niche to store files, supplies, technology, and all sorts of office necessities that would otherwise create visual clutter. When you are ready to leave the office and turn the room into a cozy den, simply shut the door and it disappears.
If you like to spread out and work across multiple surfaces at once, consider the added benefit of a console table. The extra tabletop area offered by a console that floats behind your main desk surface will allow you to keep your desk on the small side while still giving flexibility for oodles of paper! Choosing a console with a shelf across the bottom and pencil drawers at the top will help you keep all of your supplies easily stashed out of sight when the workday wraps up.
