The ways we’ve made home work
Ideas, designs that have helped us figure out how to work in living spaces
Without warning almost a year ago, parents around the world found themselves working from home alongside their kids trying to do schoolwork. The changes happened so quickly that many families had to make the best of it with hastily arranged solutions.
Now, many interior designers have helped clients make changes, big and small, to serve the whole family.
We all used to want a room with a view, noted New York interior designer Everick Brown. “Now everybody’s just searching for a room with a door.”
As well as having quiet space and privacy to work, study and join video meetings and classrooms, Brown is also focused on achieving health and wellness for his clients. For instance, incorporating a portable standing desk that can easily be moved from room to room so family members can share it when one needs a break from sitting.
There are also desktop risers that turn any desk or even the kitchen table into a standing desk.
Ergonomics matter like never before in our current, stay-athome culture. Be sure to use a desk or table and chair at the proper height, so your feet can rest solidly on the floor and your back is supported.
If an entire room can’t be repurposed, there are ways to give each family member a workspace that serves them. It doesn’t have to be large: “48 inches wide by 24 inches deep is about all you need to accommodate notes and a pencil, and your laptop or iPad, and then a desk light,” said Brown.
For one client, Brooklyn, N.Y.based interior designer Jenny Dina Kirschner carved out an open workspace within a living room by placing a desk along the back of the sofa.
Some families might find that working near one another, rather than in separate rooms, is better.
“A lot of times when kids are left to their own devices or in their own room, they get distracted really easily,” said Kirschner.
While kitchen tables can be practical workspaces, there’s a downside to this solution.
“When it becomes somebody’s command centre, then they need to pick up and move that stuff every day. And you’re sitting with somebody else’s work staring at you, and they might be worrying, ‘Oh, I need to go back to work after dinner’,” said Jenny Kitson, a designer based in New Jersey.
Managing that work/life balance is just as important as managing space, she said. We don’t just need to work and study at home this year. We need to have fun, too.
Kitson helped one client create a mini-parkour, or obstacle course, that their two young boys use for fun, physical breaks. In jolts of daily exercise, the brothers skip to a doorway, jump up to ring a bell then use a two-by-four installed in the hallway as a balance beam. Hopping off of it, they’ll crawl through nylon hoops, then climb over the back of a slipcovered sofa and crawl back to the start.