Home office desks: 10 examples for a professional and personal workspace

Many new home offices are unplanned additions to the family floorplan. Often, with no space for a dedicated office room, they’re hustled into a corner, a dark cave under the stairs or a thin, cold alcove, instead. So, home-workers are forced to squeeze in all their professional needs, such as printers, storage and task lighting, into this small multi-functional area.

With great design challenges, however, comes great opportunity. The big advantage of home working, is that you’re in a space entirely made for you. So creating a workspace that reflects your individual personality is just as essential as having the right tools. Here are some selected examples of personal home desks that can provide everything you need, while staying true to yourself.

With fit-for-purpose solutions, home-based employees can give themselves enough comfortable workspace without missing out on essentials, whatever their home office restrictions.

The need for storage has diminished both in shared and home offices thanks to the rise of cloud computing. But old habits die hard, and many home workers still need storage space for tools and materials such as printers, paper, appliances and their cables. While they may once have been an acceptable sight in the shared office, an ugly mess of cables and towering paperwork can disrupt the harmony of an otherwise restful home.

The Pegasus Home Desk from ClassiCon provides ventilated storage compartments underneath two roll-back desktop ends. The storage zones allow essential items to be retrieved without pulling back a chair – helpful when squashed into a tight spot – or cables to be fed through to the desktop cleanly. If the home office needs regular access to bulkier items, however, like reference paperwork or books, a light and customisable shelving system such as Poise from Engelbrechts allows users to create as much or as little storage as they need, to fit their individual space.

Along with a flat, clean surface with supporting materials at your fingertips, another necessity for productive work from home is suitable task lighting. Pushed into corners and up against walls, home desks are, naturally, badly lit, but cables from desk lights either stop flush furniture fittings or annoyingly snake across valuable desktop space. Home office desks with integrated lighting such as the Dante desk by FORMvorRAT, or the corner-fitting Lampe Gras – Plug & Work desk from DCW éditions provide a clean, flat desktop, free from obstruction. Integrated cabling systems can also provide hidden tunnels for other appliances and charging wires too.

A personal environment dedicated to the user’s own needs and preferences gives individual comfort throughout the working day, but home offices that also reflect their personality are essential for boosting energy levels and motivation, especially useful on apathetic Monday mornings.

Furniture designers know that space sacrificed for home offices is often tight and of an irregular shape. So desks specifically designed for these home settings are often slimmer or more adjustable than their shared office counterparts. Seeming like it’s sharing half its original form with another user on the opposite side of the wall, the Marlon Home Desk by Axel Veit only needs two legs. By using the wall itself for support, Marlon remains just as stable as those with twice as many legs, pushing its standard 60cm depth flush against the wall.

Meanwhile, the RAW Sit/Stand desk by Cube Design manages to cut the number of legs in half again, with only one. Relying solely on its wall-mounting for stability, RAW is able to mechanically rise and fall to the user’s precise position, allowing them to comfortably change from sitting to standing and back throughout the day.

For users wanting a desk to raise and lower itself on command, there are many options that offer automatic height adjustment. If space is not an issue, however, the M1-desk from Dauphin Home measures in at an extra-long 200 cm and uses integrated sub-level storage as part of one side’s support. But customisation isn’t restricted to just the vertical axis. Users of the Pegaso desk by Reflex are able to simply slide out its hidden glass worktop from a cavity inside the American walnut desk.

With many employees’ tastes to adhere to, shared offices are often restricted to neutral or simple calming colour schemes. But your home office is your domain, and whatever you say, goes. By adding strong accents of colour, pattern and texture, home workspaces can become more individual, and just more enjoyable to be in.

The Bartolo range of metallic tables and bookcases by Quinti, for example, combines light and simple forms with bright and vibrant colours. Whereas, for users who prefer their colours more contained, the Vitra Home Desk is a contemporary take on the traditional writing desk. The Home Desk stands out, however, with its popping, colour-coded parking garages for assorted materials.

With so many employees creating new home-working environments, furniture companies are racing to design exactly what they need for their home office transformations. So whether yours was once a sacrificial spare room, a dark and dusty under-stair cave or just an unused corner, you can create a desk and environment that’s both big and functional enough to fit all your professional necessities, without limiting your personality.

© Architonic