How To Arrange Home Office Furniture | Placement Tips
Lifting tips from Feng Shui, incorporating social engineering principles and testing room layout simulators we look at the best way you can arrange the core items of your home office furniture.
To summarise, when placing home office furniture we need to consider:
- practical aspects of how the office setup will function in the midst of a busy work day, and
- how your workstation can best make use of natural light, acoustics and energy flow to make it a productive and inviting place to spend time
With the tips listed below we’ll give you the foundation to build a space that is adapted to your work, improves your work habits and hopefully helps you avoid falling into the trap of re-creating a boring corporate style office.
Home office desk placement tips
If you are rearranging your home office, the key takeaway is to stop placing your desk or worksurface in the corner of a room. Instead have your desk and chair facing into the centre of the room with natural light sources illuminating your workspace from behind you.
Your desk is the first piece of furniture that comes to mind when arranging a home office, and its position will likely dictate the entire floorplan.
With the freedom to arrange your own furniture, position your desk so that at most only one of its edges are touching a wall.
This will prevent you from facing into a corner, and having your back to all of the happenings in the room.
Instead sit with your back against a wall and position your desk so that it allows you to see the entrance into the office whilst creating the greatest distance between yourself and door. This is known in feng shui as the ‘power position’.
Of course where your desk is positioned, your chair will follow – so you would do well to respect the space needing to be preserved behind you. It quickly ends up becoming annoying if you need to shuffle your way in and out of a narrow channel to get to work.
Keep an eye out too for whether your desk or chair will become obstacles to reaching power sockets or opening windows.
Don’t be tempted into using a desk which is overly large for your needs. If you life a largely digital existence whilst working the adoption of an excessively large workspace invites the opportunity for clutter and takes away space that could be used for other purposes.
Declutter with storage, but keep the essentials within reach
Keep track of what a regular work day looks like before moving any furniture around. Knowing how often you need to retrieve physical folders or files will dictate whether you need to design your office to have them close to hand, or be able to remove them from your immediate workspace.
Making your office space less cluttered will soon begin to reflect in an increase in productivity and the ability to focus better.
To do this start by considering document storage separately from storage designed for peripherals such as pens, notebooks, cables and chargers.
Closed storage (those with drawers or doors) are best to hide the cluttered appearance of documents, with open storage used when you need easy access to larger, irregular shaped items.
It’s not all about cupboards and filing cabinets however.
Think about organizing vertically using shelving that could also act as a partition between the office space and other areas of a shared room.
Keep what items you use regularly (as in multiple times each day) close to hand in an easy to access storage solution such as pull out drawers – everything else should be filed away and stacked out of sight.
Use furnishings to provide privacy
Being able to afford a whole room in your house for the purpose of home office is a luxury few of us will be able to attain. Most will have to carve our workspace out of a room that is used for multiple purposes.
Add a portable screen (such as IKEA’s RISĂ–R room divider), curtains or floor to ceiling shelving units to partition the home office from other sections of the room to create an element of privacy and encourage the working mindset.
Soundproofing can also be an effective way to achieve privacy and reduce noisy distractions.
Soundproofing your home office door can be an easy, cheap way to dull outside noises whilst rugs, absorb soundwaves and help create an environment that is better placed to facilitate concentration.
Floor plan your home office furniture using free apps
It’s a hassle to move furniture around, especially when you discover things don’t quite feel right after all of the whiteboards have been hung, desk plants have been placed and decor tweaked.
It’s far easier (and fun) to plan your furniture placement in advance in a virtual setting using free layout apps (some have certain features that are paid) such as Roomstyler; Planner5d or Floor Plan Creator.
Roomstyler in particular allows you to input exact dimensions and capture a 3d first person view of how the finished setup will look.
Final thoughts​
Your home office is an extension of your personality and work.
Arranging your home office furniture in a way that allows you to work freely and without restrictions will help you work both smarter and harder.
After all, a good-looking, functional home office will be a place you will want to spend time in and will make you a happier worker.
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