Your office is one of the few spaces in your home that always provides quiet and peace. It’s great for getting work done, or just kicking back and relaxing. Getting the most out of how your office feels is just another way to ensure that you’re increasing productivity while you’re in there and making the whole space work better together. Having a productive office space is more important than ever nowadays as more and more folks are getting remote positions. That means more folks will be working at home, which means more folks are going to need that coveted, designated office space to focus in.
If you’re one of those folks looking to bring more peace to your office, you’ll find these tips to help you organize a better office super helpful. Find out more about how to make the most of your furniture arrangement here.
The Priorities
The thing to really remember when you’re designing your new office, is that you have to prioritize functionality above all else. For example, although those antique desks with wood shades are adorable, they hardly fit the computer and monitor you’ll need to complete your work effectively on a day-to-day basis. So, obviously, part of your office design should be practical, as much as you’d like it to look aesthetically pleasing. That being said, the obvious next step for functionality is to ensure that your room can have movability. Start with keeping the entryway clear. Don’t scatter papers and boxes and make it hard to exit and enter your own office. A big part of keeping your office peaceful and liveable is keeping it organized. But keeping the entryway clear comes down to more than just making sure you don’t put your work on the floor.
As a general design guideline, it’s always best to have as few pieces of furniture near the door as possible. This ensures the illusion that a room is much more wide open than it may have originally seemed. Walking through a door with nothing near you and obstructing your view of the entirety of the room is a major way to make a small room feel bigger. Offices tend to be made from one of the smaller bedrooms in a house or apartment, so this is obviously crucial for offices.
Desk Placement
As we mentioned in our previous blog, it’s imperative to place the biggest furniture item in your room first. In an office, that’s most likely going to be your desk or desks that you’re placing before anything else. So, to help guide you in properly placing the center-piece of your room, we’ve collected a few tips just in regard to desk placement. First, always place your desk so you can see clearly when you’re sitting at your desk. You wouldn’t think it, but sitting with your back to the door will make an office feel isolated and vulnerable. Place your back to a corner instead so you can look out over the whole room with ease. Try to avoid putting your window to your back though, as oftentimes when natural light spills into the room, it’ll alter how well you can see your computer screen monitors. In fact, the best way to avoid this is to place your computer in the north or west sides of your desk, this often avoids too much sun spilling onto the screen and has also been connected to increasing creativity. Additionally, when you’re buying your desk, be sure there’s plenty of subtle places to hide your many office cords. Cords have a way of jumbling things and making your workspace feel cluttered which often decreases how much work you can get done in a day.
The Importance of Visual Balance
The idea of visual balance is based around the thought that, like a painting, a room should look balanced from the initial entry point. So, when you enter your office, there should not be a desk and a huge bookshelf tucked close together with completely open space on all other sides. This makes the room feel empty and off-kilter. But don’t think that you have to shove a bookcase into a corner to accommodate the visual balance of the room if that bookcase doesn’t fit in that spot. Instead, attempt to accomplish visual balance with art instead. You can re-balance a room with a few larger paintings to help everything feel a bit more balanced and easier on the eyes. Keep in mind, this can be accomplished with both art as well as plants or creative pottery pieces as well.
The Value of Negative Space
If you browse Instagram, you know exactly how important the idea of negative space is to the modern interior design community. If you come across an account that specializes in design and you don’t see loads of white wall space that’s used to make a room feel bigger, then you’ve just stumbled upon a total rarity. Negative space is one of the most important things to preserve in any room, and you don’t have to do it with just a plain white wall. Any wall that you leave a little sparse looking for the sake of making the whole room look bigger is always a great idea. This can be accomplished by just being choosier about where you place your high-profile furniture pieces so that a painting or series of pictures can be emphasized properly. This is especially important in office spaces as they tend to feel a little less lived-in while also feeling small and cramped at times. Putting the proper emphasis on making your ceiling look bigger and giving your eye more blank space to roam across can balance that effectively.
Invest In Better Pieces
Sometimes, when you move into a new place, you find that the furniture pieces you had before just don’t work the same there. The one thing you can always rely on is that your tastes will change, sometimes minutely, but still noticeably. Unless you’re working with heirloom pieces or things that have a significant meaning to you, you’ll start to get tired of the furniture pieces you don’t much like, and that’s ok. At Community Furnishings, we realize your taste changes and we realize that sometimes the desk you had in your old office just doesn’t work in this new spot. That’s why we carry a huge selection of furniture and we’re always updating and changing our stock so that you can have the best, trendy items available to you. Best of all, we provide a variety of financing options so that you don’t have to spend loads of money right out the door. You can save a little and pay off your new furniture over a little bit longer amount of time, making the piece more affordable in incremental payments.
Shop Our Selection Today
If you’re looking to update how your office looks because you’ll be spending more time in your home office, reach out to us. We’re always happy to help guide you in the right direction towards our favorite pieces in-stock currently. Or, you can come on into our Hammond location and shop our pieces personally. Come feel the high-quality in each of our pieces and find the perfect compliment for your new updates today.