Apartment Office Ideas for a Stylish and Productive Workspace
If you work from home, you know how important it is to have a dedicated office space. Having an area that’s clear from clutter, organized, and calming can help lower stress and boost productivity during the workday. However, some apartment-dwellers find it challenging to find the space to create an office in their unit.
To help you find some apartment office ideas, Redfin put together a list that’ll inspire you to create a stylish and productive workspace – even if you’re low on square footage. Whether you’re renting an apartment in New York or a condo in Seattle, you’re sure to find a way to incorporate an office space into your apartment.
1. Create a dedicated office space
Make sure you have a dedicated space for your office to separate your work mindset from your home mindset. If you start every day with your laptop at your kitchen table, move to your couch, and finish up emails in your bedroom, you won’t have a place to get away from work. We recommend a desk or workspace, no matter how big or small, where you can fully focus on your day job, so you can leave that work behind at the end of your day.
2. Utilize closet space
If you have a small rental home, don’t worry – big home office dreams can still happen in small spaces. “Hook” your next client as you set up shop in your coat closet. Add a drop-down desk, some lighting, and shelves, and hang those coats on hooks by the door.
Closets aren’t just for clothes anymore. Save space and build a desk, shelves, or whatever else your home office needs inside your closet. This way, it’s hidden away when you have guests, but you’d be surprised how much you can build inside a closet. Paint it a fun color and leave the doors open – you’ll get tons of compliments.
3. Keep your space clutter-free
For ultimate productivity, always keep your desk and work area clean and free of dust and clutter. Arrange your work area efficiently by keeping items you use frequently like your printer, phone, inbox, and working files within easy reach. Personalize your home office space by adding a few family photos and plants, but don’t go overboard as your goal is to keep your work area professional, orderly, and clutter-free.
4. Maximize your office storage with a tall bookshelf
Add decorative storage boxes to hold printer paper and supplies, a desktop file box for important papers, and an inbox for incoming papers. This frees up your desk (or dining table) for work and helps create a system for handling paper in your home.
5. Choose simple decor
When designing an office space in your apartment, consider placing your desk in front of or by a window. This maximizes productivity and improves focus. While it might be tempting to fill this space with all manner of mementos and knickknacks, sometimes these items can compete with our attention and create unnecessary clutter. Instead, furnish your office space with a single inspiring quote, air-purifying plants, and an oil diffuser to reduce stress.
6. Invest in ergonomic equipment
Comfort is important and ergonomics is equally as important. Spend a little extra on ergonomics; a good chair that has your back, a combination of an ergonomic keyboard and mouse (even when using your laptop), and a standing desk are all great investments. And as a productivity hack, get a second monitor — it’s worth its cost.
7. Choose multi-functional furniture
It’s rare for people to have enough space to reserve an entire extra room to be an office. The trick? Furniture that transforms or hides what’s inside.
Have you ever thought about pulling a whole workstation out of a bookshelf? Or keeping a whole table inside a standard drawer?
Transformable furniture is an amazing way to grant more versatility to any home environment. They are much more than space-saving: they’re a functional, smart, and elegant way to make our homes more resourceful and able to support our different daily activities.
8. Find the perfect location
When designing a home office in an apartment, consider the location carefully. Will you enjoy sitting in this space all day? Consider how you orient the desk for both comfort and productivity. And last but not least, don’t allow your home office to be the dumping ground for clutter. Clutter negatively affects your focus, making you less productive.
9. Personalize your space
Pick a statement item such as wallpaper, a unique light, or a fun piece of furniture, and build off of it!
Click here to check out more tips and ideas on Redfin’s blog!
Besides Atim, also Porvata, Ohmeohmyblog, Das Keyboard, Office Skills, Smallish Home, Caroline Solomon, Indefinite Loop, Pixies Did It, Simply Enough, Simple Modest Mom, Home Style Harmony, Midwest Commercial Millwork Inc., Artful Agenda contributed to the original article.
How can our furniture help us create better habits? Here are some suggestions.
Now that our home has become the place where we carry out all our activities, furniture becomes a great ally to strengthen those habits that guarantee our physical and mental health.
Since the pandemic started, our homes have suddenly become the space where we do everything: sleep, relax, cook, work, have business meetings, study, play with the children – the list is endless.
We were forced to radically reorganize our routines and spaces, adapting our habits and needs to those of the people we live with, while still trying to maintain the same performance we used to have before the pandemic lockdowns.
Here’s the problem: when we start mixing environments, we often start mixing our habits too. Imagine this: if you use the kitchen table as a work station, it is likely that your brain will very soon associate that environment with work activities, making it more difficult to detach your attention from work when it’s time to enjoy your dinner.
Mixing different habits can also lead to more serious consequences, such as not being able to concentrate, feeling more anxious, more stressed, thus compromising our well-being and, in more extreme cases, our health.
The good news is that mitigating this problem may be easier than you think.
A place for each thing and each thing in its place
In the process of improving our habits, science shows that the environment surronding us matters a lot. According to behavioral experts, a space in which everything has its place and its function is an environment in which healthy habits are formed more easily.
So, if you want to improve your work performance, if you want to stop eating snacks during the day or if you want to enjoy some precious “me time”, one way to do this is to associate specific spaces with specific activities.
There are so many ingenious transformable furniture solutions that all you have to do is identify the activity to associate with each space, making quite small changes to your home. Here are some ideas:
One solution fits all
The simple gesture of moving a piece of furniture serves as a signal to our brain that marks the beginning or the end of an activity. For this reason, a height-adjustable table can serve as a wild card.
Okey Dokey
When you start working, for example, adjust the height of the table to a comfortable sitting position. At the end of the working day, bring it to a center table position and take away your work devices. With this small change your living room becomes more welcoming again, the perfect space to relax later in the day.
Another solution is to install a swivel table that slides over the top of the cabinet. To kick-start the children’s remote classes of the day, slide te table and open it up to delimit a desk where they can study with plenty of space. Once classes are over, all they have to do is to return the table to its original position, changing the environment and freeing the space for playful activities.
Sestante
Keep what you need close at hand
One of the best ways to nurture a habit is to easily access everything that helps you put it into practice. The opposite is also true: creating obstacles and dispersion can be useful to mitigate a habit that you want to lose.
To avoid having several snacks throughout the day, here is a super simple (and brilliant) idea: store all the snacks in a single cabinet whose door also becomes a nice table. Every time you open the wardrobe, you will automatically have a table in front of you where to have a proper snack. Seating down and eating is a powerful strategy to consolidate the healthy habit of giving the right time and attention to what you eat.
A similar furnishing solution can also benefit your concentration during work or study hours. Keep all the necessary work related material and devices in one single place, close at hand, while using a folding desk to create a dedicated workstation. Close it up when you’re done and move your focus to the next activity of the day.
Desk
Out of sight, out of mind
Still talking about work: for our mental and physical health, it is essential to have habits that promote the balance between the time we dedicate to our job and to ourselves.
It’s easier to disconnect at the end of the day if your station is out of sight, for example. Retractable furniture is a must-have for anyone who wants a practical solution that does not require a lot of space or complications. A normal drawer compartment is enough to install an entire pull-out desk, which can be used as a place dedicated to study or work.
Or, even better: if you have an entire closet space available, you can create a complete workstation that opens and closes according to your work routine. In addition, the wardrobe door serves to further isolate you, contributing to the separation between rooms and, consequently, to concentrate more easily.
Evolution +39
These are just a few ideas for designing a home that supports a healthier routine. All you have to do is to choose wisely how to apply transformable mechanisms to your spaces. After all, why be a victim of your environment when you can be the architect of it?
Time to renovate the house? Create multipurpose environments with transformable furniture
With the extension of the Italian Furniture Bonus, 2021 is the perfect time to invest in furnishing solutions that make the most of domestic spaces
For those thinking abou refurnishing their homes in Italy, 2021 is the perfect year!
The incentive of the Italian Furniture Bonus, intended to furnish properties which have been reformed last year, has been extended until December 31th 2021 with a new limit of 16 thousand euros.
It could be the perfect opportunity to create multipurpose environments at home, perfectly suited to these post-pandemic times and the new use we make of domestic spaces.
Here are 3 ingenious tips that use transformable furniture solutions, able to make home spaces more versatile and also stylish:
Home Office is King
ShelfDesk Workstation
Desk
Oplà +39
The global pandemic has made Home Offices the main protagonists of our homes in 2020, but the new ways of working remotely will most probably remain long after Covid is under control: in Italy, for instance, 2 in 3 companies plan to maintain remote working solutions even after emergency.
To create a space dedicated to work or to study is now an investment one cannot renounce to.
For those who want an agile Home Office, concealed solutions a are a great idea. A single movement is enough to extract a large desk from the cabinet, while keeping the internal compartment free to store the comuter, any documents and other office materials.
The great advantage of these solutions, especially in multipurpose environments, is to clearly delimit the spaces and times dedicated to work: opening the workstation desk is equivalent to starting the working day, while closing it means disconnecting and changing the focus to other activities.
Enjoy the Open Space
Twice moves from one side of the island to the other
Space is never enough when you spend many hours at home.
Uniting the kitchen and the living room in an Open Space results in a larger environment and, consequently, increases the feeling of well-being.
Breakfast reveals a hidden dining table kept inside the kitchen island
Atim creates very useful solutions for the kitchen island. Its various models of sliding tops, for example, can be used in different ways: as an extra surface to place the ingredients while preparing lunch, as a table to invite friends for dinner, as a snack corner for a quick bite. Morover, it is also possible to transform them into a workstation when necessary, use the sliding tops to do homework with the children and even support them with home schooling.
Corner creates a snack corner that expands the surface of the worktop
Be inspired by Multifunctional Solutions
Another key concept in any home these days is the optimization of spaces. It doesn’t matter if you live in a big city, where the available square meters are limited, or if you are in a spacious countryside house: the great advantage of multifunctional furniture is to use space and environments in an intelligent way.
Cook creates a real chef’s corner in the kitchen: cutting board, cutlery drawer and snack table. Three functions in one solution.
The usual cutlery drawer gains an extra function with a top that acts as a table for a quick snack. You can also take advantage of a regular drawer to insert a cutting board, equipped with knife holder and a practical basket for the mixer or waste. Or, if you really want to give carte blanche to your imagination, with the right furniture system you can turn the drawer into a coffee table to be used in the kitchen, where the space and the tables are never enough.
Functional is a container drawer with lid, which multiplies the use of kitchen spaces
Atim specialty is the creation of transformable furniture systems, made 100% of aluminum and with the recognized quality of a Made in Italy product. For 25 years we have been committed to shaping the future of furniture design and increasing the usability of spaces in domestic environments all over the world, which has made us the partner of choice for the main players in the Italian and international furniture industry.
If you want to know more about our solutions, get in touch with us!
Here is ShelfDesk: working from home will never be the same
How to keep a high performance working from home? Create your home office with ShelfDesk, the complete space-saving and multifunctional workstation.
With COVID-19’s global pandemic, home working has become a must for professionals from the most diverse sectors. As remote work grows more and more, many wonder: how to be productive at home as much as (or even more than) in the workplace?
It is essential to prepare our homes in order to ensure our own performance. Creating a dedicated space for your office at home, where you can keep up with work or study requests with the maximum concentration and in the best possible situation.
To meet the needs of the current scenario, Atim is proud to announce the arrival of ShelfDesk, a complete workstation, consisting of a wooden cabinet equipped with a pull-out top, the right combination of practicality and comfort for those who want to bring smart working to a higher level.
ShelfDesk, the ready-to-use workstation
ShelfDesk is a space-saving piece of furniture equipped with an extra work top, which opens and closes as needed. When open, it becomes a retractable desk. Once closed, SheflDesk acts as a cabinet or shelf, optimizing the space available in any situation.
ShelfDesk is supplied fully assembled and ready for use. Furthermore, it is possible to install it directly on the wall or hook it to another existing piece of furniture with the use of its special Clamp kit or Shelf Supporters kit.
There are 3 versions available: Desktop, Laptop and Workstation.
In the Desktop version, ShelfDesk consists of a pull-out top without front, with an underlying compartment to keep your keyboard and mouse for example.
ShelfDesk Laptop adds a front to the extractable desk, which hides the underlying compartment, ideal for those who want a more complete aesthetic.
Finally, the Workstation model constitutes a real work and study station including not only the pull-out top with front, but a cabinet with USB / 230V socket, perfect for keeping the computer always charged while following lessons from a distance or attend business meetings.
“Atim’s purose is to shape the future of furniture design with solutions that improve the usability of the spaces we live in and, consequently, the quality of the time we spend there. We are good at creating new solutions. We have done it several times and we are doing it once again with the creation of ShelfDesk, the first line we’ve ever created for retail. They are space-saving furniture developed specifically for those who want to obtain a workstation dedicated to their work or study in a practical and smart way, even in small spaces. ” – says Stefano del Prete, CEO of Atim who closely followed the development of the new line.
How to order your ShelfDesk
It takes a single click! The other novelty inaugurated by ShelfDesk is Atim’s debut in online retail.
All of its 3 models, as well as the Clamp and Shelf supporters kits, are available on Amazon.com, with free shipping throughout Italy.
Do you want to improve the way you work from home?