Modern home office design

Depending on your profession, the home office can be an incredibly important room. It is a place that should stimulate focus and foster creativity, while still seamlessly fitting into your house as a definitively homely space – incorporating all of the comforts that that entails.

Whilst we originally began designing kitchens at Extreme Design, over the years the requests to design other rooms have grown organically and our designers always leap at the opportunity to move into other areas of the home. In this article, we look into home office and study room design, to bring you a straightforward guide to crafting a fantastic workspace within your home.

Ensure you have a calming atmosphere

Too often, when we think about work we instantly associate it with stress. The high-pressure hustle and bustle of the working day is certainly not made any easier inside a stuffy cubicle or atop a 40-storey tower. This is where a home office can stand head and shoulders above the alternatives.

When designing your study room, you can craft a work area explicitly designed to introduce a calming atmosphere that focuses you. First and foremost, you’ll have to think about where exactly you want the office to be placed in the home. To encourage that calming atmosphere, make sure it’s somewhere in the home that you enjoy. Try to ensure that the office has plenty of natural light and is away from distractions such as a busy road, the children’s room or areas of the house that experience heavy footfall such as the kitchen.

Much has been said of the calming power of biophilic design in the workplace. Incorporating plants into your home office design can, therefore, be incredibly important. Consider incorporating nature into the design of your office wherever possible, you’ll be astounded by the positive effects the natural world can have on your productivity.

Beautiful, utilitarian furnishings

In line with the calming atmosphere that you should create in your home office, you must also aim to include plenty of beautiful and functional furniture. If you work full-time from the comfort of your home, you’ll be spending a lot of time in your office, so make sure that it is somewhere you want to be, somewhere you can thrive.

Choose furnishings that reflect all aspects of your personality and elevate the entire feeling of the office. Perhaps you are a traditionalist, you think of nothing better than orchestrating your spreadsheets from a leather-bound captain’s chair behind a swart mahogany desk. On the other hand, you might be in love with modern design, seeking to craft a truly space-age monochromatic flow within your study.

The office chair is an incredibly important aspect of the furnishings within the room. While aesthetics may come first when it comes to desks, shelving and decor, functionality is the most important aspect of the chair. Don’t view it on the basis of looks alone, your chair must be comfortable enough for you to sit in for hours at a time. Consider an ergonomic office chair designed to promote posture and performance, while keeping neck and back pain at bay.

However you choose to design your office, comfort is key. Aim to craft a tasteful room that you can envisage yourself spending a truly enjoyable nine hours per day in. You may not work 9-5, but your office should make it easy to imagine it.

Modern wooden study room

Storage and layout is key

Even the most calm-inducing designs cannot withstand piles of unorganised paperwork, files or other work-related equipment scattered across the surfaces, so ensuring that your design has the right storage is crucial. As well as checking that your storage has enough capacity, you need to ensure that you have the right kind of storage. If you have a lot of paperwork and you like using hanging files, lots of drawer storage most likely won’t meet your needs. Equally, ample cupboards may not work for a designer or architect with lots of drawing utensils and stationary.

Start by thinking about what you use to do your work, starting with your most frequently used items and working your way through to your least frequently used. Not only will this demonstrate what you need to store, but it will also help you to plan a layout that will encourage the most efficient working. Wheeling your office chair across your room every day may be fun at first it could quickly become tiresome, instead, position your most-used items closest to your chair for easy access.

Seamless technological integration

Even for the traditionalist, today’s home office is no longer the domain of the typewriter or inkwell. Whether you like it or not, much of your work is likely to be done from behind a computer screen, so make sure that you have enough space on your desktop and enough sockets to accommodate your technology.

Despite the omnipresent ubiquity of technology today, it can still be a distraction and may not be befitting of the design of the room. Subtly hiding it away is always an option. Integrating your technology into the furniture of a room could work beautifully. From hidden plug sockets that provide a discreet charging area, to incorporated speakers that fill the office with ambient music, almost all modern technology can be concealed for modern, sleek flow within your home’s technical hub.

If you would like further assistance with your new home office, get in touch with our designers today. We can collaborate with you to create a study design that meets all of your requirements for style, storage and comfort.