Home offices that hold up to real work

Where should the desk go?

Three constraints govern the answer, and they conflict often enough that one has to give.

• Light from the side. A window behind the monitor puts a bright field directly behind your screen, and your eyes fight it all day. A window behind your chair turns every video call into a silhouette. Side light avoids both.
• Your back to a wall, not a door. Facing into the room with something solid behind you is measurably more comfortable to work in, and it also gives video calls a controlled background.
• Power and data reach the desk. An extension cord across a rug is a decision that has already gone wrong.

Where the three conflict, light wins. A desk in a slightly awkward position with good light gets used; a perfectly placed desk with glare does not.

In older Park Cities houses the study is often a small, well-proportioned room with a single window and one usable wall — in which case a built-in desk along that wall, with the window to one side, is almost always the right answer. In newer North Dallas houses the office is frequently a larger room with a double-height window, where glare control matters more than desk placement.

Dimensions that decide comfort

The one that catches people out is 36 inches behind the chair. A desk pushed into an alcove that leaves 28 inches behind it means the chair hits the wall every time you stand, and after a week it is the reason you work at the kitchen table instead.

Lighting for screens and video calls

Three separate lighting problems, and they have three separate answers.

• Screen glare. Solved by desk orientation first and by window treatment second. Solar screen shades on west and south glass cut glare while keeping the view — the specification detail is in the window treatments guide.
• Task light for paper. A desk lamp, positioned on the opposite side from your writing hand so it does not cast a shadow across the page.
• Face light for calls. Light needs to come from in front of you and slightly above — a lamp on a shelf across the room, or a wall sconce. Overhead downlights alone put shadows under the eyes and make everyone look tired.

Keep everything at 2700K and dimmed. Mixed color temperatures are visible on camera in a way they are not to the eye, and a room lit at 4000K reads as an office in a photograph and as a clinic in person.

Why do calls sound bad in a home office?

A room with hardwood floors, plaster walls and bare windows is a reverberation chamber. You do not notice it; everyone on the call does.

Soft surfaces, in order of how much difference each makes for the money:

1. A rug with a pad. The single largest improvement available, and it also stops the chair castors from being audible.
2. Lined drapery. Absorbs reflection off the glass, which is the hardest surface in the room.
3. An upholstered chair other than the desk chair — and a chair anyone can sit in when they come to talk to you.
4. Books on open shelves. Genuinely effective, because an irregular surface scatters sound instead of reflecting it flat.
5. A solid-core door with a proper seal. The difference between a door that closes and a door that shuts out the house.

Storage, cables and power

• Decide what actually has to live in the room. Paper files, reference books, equipment, supplies, and the things that only need to be nearby. Then size storage to that, not to a generic bookcase.
• Closed storage below, open above is the workable default: the unattractive necessities out of sight, books and objects where they are useful and visible.
• Power at desk height. Outlets in the desk return or a grommet through the surface. Reaching under a desk to a baseboard outlet is the detail that separates a designed office from a room with a desk in it.
• A dedicated circuit if there is significant equipment, and hardwired data if the house has a weak point where the office sits.
• Cable management as a joinery item. A channel at the back of the desk, a cabinet for the router and the modem, and a plan for where the printer lives. Printers are ugly, loud and always needed.
• A place for a bag. Small, and the difference between a tidy room and a permanently untidy one.

Two people in one room

Two people working in one room is now common, and it fails on sound rather than on space.

• Back to back or side by side, not facing. Facing desks means two people looking at each other over monitors all day, which nobody enjoys.
• Separate task lighting, so one person can work in a dim room while the other is on a call.
• Only one of you can take calls in the room unless there is a second closable space. Establish which one before the joinery is built.
• Two chairs, two heights. People are different sizes; a shared desk at a single height suits one of you.
• Storage divided visibly. Shared storage becomes one person’s storage within a month.

Jan Revels

ASID Allied Professional Interior Designer · Chateau Concepts, Dallas

Jan has practiced interior design in Dallas since 1997 and founded Chateau Concepts in 2001. She holds a BFA in Interior Design from the University of North Texas. She designs and general-contracts residential and commercial projects across the Park Cities, Preston Hollow and North Dallas. Read her full profile →

Written and reviewed by Jan Revels before publication