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 to furnish a small house: solutions for space-saving and functional furniture
How to choose the right furniture for a small apartment? Here are some ideas, tips and advice on how to furnish small spaces. Find inspiration with many examples and photos of space-saving furniture solutions.
Light colors, adequate lighting and the application of mirrors certainly work well to make spaces feel wider, but it is furniture the key element to make rooms actually more spacious, functional and well organized.
The golden rule for furnishing a small house or a small apartment is to take advantage of every useful corner to make it highly functional, as well as aesthetically satisfying. Using space-saving furniture equipped with transformable solutions is the ideal solution to have a more versatile home, able to quickly change, transform and adapt to the dynamism of modern life.
Tips for furnishing small houses
Equip the walls with shelves and pull-out tables
Optimizing the spaces in the living area may seem like a challenge, but it’s actuallty quite simple with transformable furnishing solutions. You can easily pull-out a desk from a library compartment, for example: Oplà +39 adds an extra table that opens and closes with a simple movement, in order to engage or free space as needed.
Have an island with a sliding top at the open space
With little space available for the kitchen and living room, having an open space is often the preferred architectural solution in small appartments. The island becomes a great ally of aesthetics and functionality, acting as a separator between the two areas.
But what if it were also an aggregator? Sliding tops can totally or partially cover the surface of the island, allowing it to be used for both kitchen and living room activities. With a single movement, the island expands or becomes compact, adapting to the needs of the moment.
Solutions such as the Top33 can hide the induction or electric hob as well as the sink, which are revealed only when it’s time to prepare the meal and have a large table to enjoy the dishes. When dinner is over, just put the top back in its original position to free up the space, making the house more spacious, tidy and aesthetically pleasing.
Optimize the space in the kitchen
Expand the kitchen surfaces as needed
Kitchen surfaces never seem to be enough – even more so in small homes. The transformable furnishing solutions give more versatility to the kitchen at the same time as they optimize the available space.
You can use a standard drawer to store a pull-out top extension: Oplà Top positions itself flush with the top to increase the useful surface of the kitchen whenever it’s necessary. The system is also easy to clean and to put back in its drawer with a single movement.
Choose a space-saving pull-out table
A standard drawer compartment is enough to hide an entire table: thanks to surprising space-saving systems, such as the Lunch model by Atim, a table can be extracted from inside a drawer, useful for a quick snack or to place ingredients and utensils necessary for the preparation of food.
Innovate with multifunctional solutions in the kitchen
Maximize every space of the kitchen using multifunctional furnishing solutions, which make life much more practical.
Systems like Cook create a true chef’s corner, even if they only require the space of a standard drawer. Cook brings together 3 functions: cutlery holder, cutting board and snack table – with the addition of a convenient aluminum basket for collecting what has been cut and blend the ingredients.
Install glass sliding doors for extra light
In confined spaces, it is worth evaluating the advantages of sliding glass doors. Why? Because the sliding glass doors not only serve to divide spaces without cluttering, but also allow natural light to easily circulate among the different rooms. An illuminated environment increases the feeling of spaciousness of the house and directly affects the well-being of the inhabitants.
Atim sliding door mechanisms can add that right touch of design to the environment.
The right furniture to create a space-saving Home Office
How to create a space-saving home office
The Home Office has become the protagonist of interior design since remote working entered everyone’s lives. But is it possible to have an adequate Home Office in an apartment of a few square meters?
Of course it is! Once again the transformable furniture manages not only to create a dedicated workstation, but also to optimize the available space to welcome other activities after the workday is over.
There are plenty of solutions to design the ideal Home Office: from the most discreet, such as equipping a piece of furniture with fold-away or pull-out tables, to the most surprising, like hiding a complete workstation behind the door of a cabinet.
Sliding tops: the solution for a functional, tidy and elegant kitchen
To furnish a modern kitchen, before even starting to select its materials, colors and appliances, the main concern should be the search for the best solutions to organize its space.
Those who want to create a functional kitchen which is, at the same time, aesthetically elegant, can innovate by applying a sliding top, such as those proposed in Atim’s Trasformabili line. Among the different models available, the solutions surprise for their ease of use, great resistence and that evident touch of design.
Striking sliding tops for the open plan kitchen
The trend of the openspace kitchen, connected to the living room, puts the kitchen island as protagonist of the whole room. To facilitate its organization, cleaning and use, it’s possible to apply a sliding top that completely or partially covers the worktop.
When closed, Top 33 conceals the whole worktop, giving the kitchen a clean and modern design. The elegance of the top’s minimum thickness (only 33 mm) is combined with the aluminum guides that make up its sliding system, guaranteeing a 60kg load capacity.
But why stop at the worktop, when you can add a design top that embelishes also the side of the island? Flap creates a sliding snack counter. Thanks to its guides, recessed laterally and under the island top, it is possible to enjoy a convenient snack angle placed at the end of the cabinet.
The sliding top that extends the kitchen peninsula
Both enthusiasts and design professionals are increasingly falling in love with the peninsula at the kitchen. There are several good reasons for that: it is the right compromise between the linear kitchen and the kitchen island, it adapts to either larger or smaller rooms and it often proves to be the key solution to take advantage of the available space in the best possible way.
Also in this configuration, Trasformabili sliding top solutions are an ally to improve the use of space, combining practicality with the “wow” effect of a design kitchen. Breakfast Top, for example, extends the island, creating a snack corner or hiding the worktops at will.
One more thing to keep in mind: the top doesn’t have to necessarily slide linearly. Solutions such as Corner add a surprising effect to the kitchen especially for its diagonal movement.
How to apply the sliding top in the linear kitchen
Is it possible to have a sliding top in a linear kitchen? If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, here’s the answer: yes, it’s possible to optimize even the top of a linear kitchen with a sliding mecchanism.
The different sizes of Atim’s Corner system allow the application of a top that slides diagonally.
This solution not only creates a comfortable snack corner in the kitchen, but also helps to expand the worktop when preparing meals.
To learn more about our solutions, download the catalog of the Trasformabili line or contact us for commercial information: marketing@atimspa.com.