We asked designers and architects for the inspiration-crushing gaffes they see in residential workspaces, and what to do instead. Plus: the most egregious home-office setups they’ve witnessed.
3 min
FOR A YEAR now we’ve all been getting copious advice on how to make our remote workspaces worthy of our toil. Why then, incredulous designers want to know, are they still seeing people’s unmade beds during video calls?
“Professionals should exude professionalism,” said New York designer Vicente Wolf, who’s seen home offices cheapened by obviously plastic floral arrangements. “Keep the space clean and tidy. Straighten pictures, edit your bookcase. Take the time to see your background as it is conveyed by your computer’s eye.”
Here, interiors pros share five other home office blunders they’ve observed, and what to do instead.
The quickest way to make your office feel like a college dorm room? Shove an undersized desk against a windowless wall, warned Dallas architect Eddie Maestri. “Nothing looks more sad and depressing.”
Instead: “What you see affects your mood and increases your work performance,” said Mr Maestri. If a real vista isn’t available, he positions the desk so its occupant has an expansive view of the room.
Leave webs to the spiders. “I hate when tangled cords dangle from the desk in plain sight,” said Dallas designer Traci Connell.
Instead: If you have scope to place your desk against the back of a sofa or love seat, suggests Mark Lavender, an interior designer in Winnetka, Ill., “cords can then run behind the sofa, and the desk lamp pulls double duty as a sofa light.” Ms Connell channels cords through grommet holes she has drilled into desktops. Adapting the same idea, New York architect Eric J. Smith outfits a drawer or cabinet with a power strip and cables for an out-of-site charging station. Mr Maestri suggests this hack: “Connect all your cords to one power strip, then place the power strip and additional cord lengths in a small wastebasket under your desk.”
If you can’t shut the door on a dedicated workplace come day’s end, your “office” confronts you until bedtime, with files and monitors leering at you while you try to relax. Uncontained professional detritus compromises the life part of the life-work balance.
Instead: “It’s important to retain the other functions of the room,” said Mr Smith. Los Angeles designer Anne Carr’s stern advice: Order a cabinet, “preferably one with doors that close.” A bookcase with bins or baskets, she noted, can also hide essential but essentially ugly gear. Another option: a small, wheeled filing cabinet that can be pulled out during the day for extra desk space and tucked under a simple desk after hours, said Jerry Caldari of New York’s Bromley Caldari Architects. An inherently beautiful desk itself can pass for a civilized member of the family. Veronica Mishaan, a designer with offices in Bogotá, Colombia, and New York, chooses secretaries, whose surfaces fold up, or small, delicately curved desks. Both blend into a room without screaming “workspace,” she said.
“You don’t need an ordinary black faux-leather chair—or one that looks like your kid’s gaming chair—pulled up to a clunky wooden desk to make you feel that you’re ‘working’ from home,” said Spencer Bass, creative director for office furniture retailer Label 180.
Instead: While the ideal work chair is still ergonomic, you can de-corporate the rest of your space. Chairish co-founder Anna Brockway suggests swapping utilitarian task lamps for ceramic varieties with contrasting colour shades—a magnolia-green lamp and cornflower-blue shade, for example. Hang artwork that inspires you, “and don’t forget about desktop accessories like vases with fresh flowers and beautiful vessels to hold your paper clips,” she said.
Pocket doors and sliding barn doors leave gaps that let the voices of remote-learners and WFH mates bounce right through.
Instead: Get a real door! Swinging solid ones are Brooklyn designer Adam Meshberg’s first choice, “not only for your privacy, but for the rest of the [household which] likely doesn’t care much about your conversations.” If natural light is a concern, he said, frosted glass doors let sunshine through but not the gaze of curious kids. Mr Meshberg also finds virtue in hardware that locks to let the “Zoom calls we’re all constantly on” unfold uninterrupted.
“A home office situated inside the walk-in closet…with the clothes hanging all over the work area.” —Vicente Wolf, designer, New York City
“I designed a home for a family that bought two used cubicles and put them in their formal living room. It was quite the negotiation to get them to sell the desks and start fresh.” —Kiel Wuellner, vice president of design at Vesta
“I had a client who was a big-game hunter and wanted me to make the legs of one of his safari animals into desk legs. I had to take a hard pass on this job.” —Chris Goddard, designer, Springdale, Ark.
“A urinal in the room! Can you imagine?” —Elizabeth Krueger, designer, Chicago
“An office that was covered floor to ceiling in white boards with words and tasks listed in tiny handwriting everywhere. It’s instant overwhelm.” —Christina Kim, designer, Manasquan, N.J.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
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AI-powered travel agents are challenging online booking platforms, but Airbnb’s exclusive listings and direct customer relationships could give it an edge. Its next challenge: turning repeat guests into loyal customers through stronger rewards and innovation.
3 min
AI agents like Muse can already find you the cheapest hotel room in Paris. But they can’t locate a cheaper version of that Catskills cabin you’ve been eyeing, because it might only be available on Airbnb ABNB -1.43%decrease.
Investors should pay attention to that distinction. When Meta Platforms META 3.38%increase launched its Muse agent last month, travel stocks including Booking Holdings BKNG -1.19%decrease, Expedia and Airbnb all fell sharply.
Airbnb, though, has a real chance to emerge as a winner from the upheaval. The catch: Its stock already reflects above-industry growth. To justify its valuation, Airbnb will need to turn repeat customers into loyal ones.
Online travel companies make much of their money by simplifying search and collecting fees on bookings. AI agents threaten that model.
But not all travel marketplaces are equally exposed. Booking and Expedia largely sell hotel rooms that travelers can also book directly or through competing sites. If an agent can find the same room elsewhere, it has little reason to favor either Booking or Expedia.
Booking and Expedia also sell sponsored listings that steer travelers toward particular properties. Wells Fargo estimates those will account for about 8% of Expedia’s revenue and a much higher percentage of profit next year.
Airbnb has more ways to adapt. More than half its listings are available only on its platform, and more than 90% of its traffic comes directly to its app or website.
The customer relationship doesn’t end after booking, either. Bernstein analyst Richard Clarke notes that 90% of Airbnb guests go on to message their hosts about arrival times, keys or local taxes, giving Airbnb a connection to both sides of the transaction.
How the companies have responded to the possible agentic future is telling.
Expedia quickly signed on as a Muse partner. Airbnb hasn’t, and Chief Executive Brian Chesky says AI chatbots have so far been a boon, sending customers to Airbnb’s website.
Chatbots might work for buying paper towels, he quipped at a Skift conference last month, but people enjoy planning trips. He argued that browsing dozens of homes isn’t something a text-based chatbot is well suited for.
Still, the AI jitters arrived just as Airbnb was persuading investors it deserved its pricey multiple. For years after its 2020 initial public offering, the stock—which trades around 25 to 30 times forward earnings—went nowhere. Investors saw a mature operator trading at a growth premium.
This year, Airbnb growth seems to be accelerating. The stock jumped in August after the company raised its full-year revenue-growth guidance with its second-quarter results. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski credits a run of product improvements under a revamped leadership team.
Among the changes: letting guests reserve now and pay later, adding hotels, and a redesigned home page and app. Investors were also betting on what comes next, including thousands more hotels, car rentals and, eventually, advertising.
The irony is that some of those growth drivers push Airbnb closer to the kind of business Booking and Expedia run—the kind of business AI agents could threaten. Even if AI agents capture a large share of travel planning and booking, Airbnb would capture the demand. But it and others would slowly lose control over how customers find and choose properties.
That would undermine the advertising opportunity investors are counting on. The bigger point for Airbnb and other marketplaces is that losing control of customer acquisition could mean surrendering some of their pricing power and margins.
To bulletproof itself, Airbnb might look to another e-commerce giant that has so far kept AI agents at arm’s length: Amazon.
Like Amazon, Airbnb has a loyal customer base and hard-to-match supply. But it has nothing like Prime membership to make customers think twice before taking their business elsewhere.
That is where loyalty comes in. Business travelers stick with Hilton or Marriott because enough nights earn them perks. Leisure travelers rarely accumulate stays with one chain. Airbnb has millions of listings and plenty of repeat customers, but no broad rewards program. It has begun experimenting with credits on hotel stays, but it should make loyalty a priority, not just a promotion.
Airbnb also plans to launch its own AI agent next year. But travelers using an agent might still want it to search Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking and hotel websites alike, rather than limit itself to one company’s inventory.
Eventually, Airbnb might have to strike deals with agent makers, using its unique homes as leverage to negotiate favorable terms, says Gawrelski. Such deals, along with rewards for loyal guests, could over the long term eat into the company’s roughly 13% take rate, he adds. But if they bring in enough additional bookings, the trade-off could be worthwhile.
History offers a reason not to panic. The shift from desktop to mobile unsettled investors in Alphabet and Amazon, but both emerged as major beneficiaries. Companies with valuable assets can come out of a platform shift stronger, if they adapt quickly enough.
Airbnb has homes the bots can’t easily replace. Now it needs to give guests a reason to insist on booking them there.
