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.
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New research suggests that bonuses make employees feel more like a mere cog in a wheel.
2 min
When it comes to rewarding workers financially, cash isn’t always king.
Companies frequently give employees monetary bonuses, but a new study suggests that paid vacation time is a perk employers should also consider.
The study’s authors say that while they didn’t explicitly look into whether employees prefer time off, the study found that receiving extra vacation time rather than bonus money makes workers feel less like a mere cog in a wheel and more like people who are recognised and valued as individuals with a life beyond work.
It makes them feel more human, in the researchers’ terms.
And that feeling benefits employers as well as employees, says Sanford DeVoe, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the study’s authors.
Feeling more human is strongly correlated with higher job satisfaction, greater engagement with work, better relationships with colleagues and less inclination to leave a job, he says.
In one experiment, the researchers asked about 1,500 participants to recall times when they received a monetary bonus or paid time off—all had received both—and how that made them feel.
Participants responded to the question on a 7-point scale, from feeling more like a robot on the low end of the scale to feeling more human on the high end. Monetary bonuses were given an average score of 5.04, compared with 5.4 for paid vacation time.
“While that difference may sound modest numerically, it represents a meaningful psychological shift,” says DeVoe. “It’s the difference between feeling neutral and feeling genuinely seen as a person.”
The authors then sought to better understand why paid vacation time made employees feel more human. In another experiment, about 500 participants were asked to imagine starting a new job where they might be awarded a bonus. Some were told the bonus would be an extra week of vacation, others were told it would be an extra week of pay.
Participants were then asked about their expectations for being able to keep their work and home lives separate in the new job. Those who could hope for a bonus of extra time off expected more separation between their work and personal lives than those whose potential bonus would be extra pay.
They also reported feeling more human on the 7-point scale. This suggested to the researchers that time off makes people feel more human because it creates a clearer psychological distance from work than a monetary bonus.
In a third experiment, the researchers further tested the idea that clear boundaries between work and personal lives were driving their results.
Two hundred participants were told to imagine being on a vacation and receiving two texts, including one from their mother. Half were told the second text was from a friend and half were told the second text was from their boss.
The authors then measured how human participants felt after each scenario. The average score for those receiving a text from a friend was 5.4 on the 7-point scale, compared with 4.16 for those receiving a text from the boss.
The difference in the scores “demonstrates that even minimal work intrusions can undo the psychological benefits of time off,” says DeVoe. “It shows that it’s not just time away that matters—it’s whether work actually lets go.”
All of this is important for employers looking to get the most out of their workers, he says. “For managers concerned with sustainable productivity, giving people uninterrupted time away from work can be a powerful lever.”
