TL;DR: Learning how to furnish a home office is key to creating a workspace that balances productivity, comfort, and personal style. This guide walks you through designing a functional layout while layering in inspiring details that make your office uniquely yours.
With thoughtful planning, your home office can become a haven for focus and inspiration.
While once an example of excess and luxury, a home office in today’s work climate is all but essential. With so many professionals working from the comfort of their homes, one’s home office has become a staple room in many people’s day-to-day environment.
However, unlike formal, traditional workplaces, which often employ professional designers to balance aesthetics, comfort, and productivity, our home offices must be entirely designed and styled by those who would use them. And unless you’re a professional interior designer, deciding how your space should look, flow, and feel can be a challenge.
Thankfully, we’ve assembled some of our top tips for how to furnish a home office to balance beauty and ease of use. Consider this your cheat sheet for a more stylish, more functional, and more inspirational office at home.
Obviously, everyone’s work is unique. Whether you spend most of your day in front of the computer, invite clients into your home office, or use a variety of physical or digital tools to carry out your job will have major impacts on how best to style your home office. So, before you go picking out paint samples, furniture pieces, or other aesthetic touches, first consider the scale of your space, how you inhabit it, and how you’d like to move throughout it to ensure everything you need to carry out your tasks is easily close at hand.
But keep this in mind as well: though you want your space to, above all else, feel productive, it’s also important to ensure your space feels comfortable. This is a room you will likely spend a lot of time in, so balance task-oriented touches with less functional yet more comfortable and soothing touches as well.
Now that you’ve considered the flow of your space, begin furnishing it with the essential furniture you will use each and every day. Pieces should lend themselves to the common flow of your work, whether solo or collaborative. However, they should also be modestly sized, only taking up a portion of your total room (for reasons we’ll discuss later).
Consider these essentials as you begin to arrange your aesthetic:
Obviously, furnishing a room with only these pieces would create a fairly spartan space. But these essentials form the backbone of your room and allow you to add decorative flourishes elsewhere to personalize, humanize, and familiarize your space.
Do you need a printer/scanner for your work? A second chair or couch for guests? Perhaps you want to recreate the full in-office experience, with professional touches throughout? The reason we recommend modest core furniture with plenty of egress space is that every additional element added to your room will start to fill it quickly. Once you have your core furniture selected, you can then figure out how to fit in this file cabinet or that security safe to help aid in your workflow without overburdening your space with clutter.
Once your core furniture and your convenience elements have been selected and placed, you can then add to the room with the decorative touches that will make it yours. This can include fun lighting, organization accessories, books, and more.
Your bookshelf is a great place to start in this regard. Of course, how to style a bookshelf will come down to your work identity. What to put on your bookshelf may include:
Here, think of it as a canvas that can celebrate a balance between non-functional decorative objects, information-relevant documentation, and personal touches.
As with any other room in your home, solid bookshelf styling ideas start with a consistent and cohesive palette selection. Consider the aesthetic of your room at large, and layer in color choices and textural elements that will help echo your aesthetic.
Next, select a few of the books you’d like to put on your bookshelf alongside your decorative objects. But remember, balance here is key. A mindful and symmetrically balanced display of the two is the key aesthetic way to organize your bookshelf. It will help add beauty while also giving you access to the books and documents you may need to carry out your work.
When you are ready to make your home office a space you love spending your workday, Home Accents II has everything you need. From functional and high-quality furniture to decorative pieces that echo your personal work aesthetic, we can help transform your space into a haven for productivity and inspiration.
We can even help with desktop styling, bookshelf styling ideas, and more.
Visit our showroom in Surfside Beach, SC, to see the latest pieces we have available, or browse our selections online to get inspiration. Learn more about our home office furniture here.