What If You Don’t Have Room For A Home Office?

From the Sydney Morning Herald

What if you work from home, but just don’t have a spare room to use as your home office? There are lots of clever ways to sneak an efficient workspace into your existing living areas. The best way is with custom-designed cabinetry. You can create a compact home office in all sorts of spots, like the empty space under a staircase, a wide landing or hallway, or the corner of a large living space.

“We like to customise things,” says designer Sarah Davison. “We do a workstation with a cantilevered desk for the computer, and little pencil drawers under the desktop for things like chequebooks and stationery. Then we do another full-height cupboard with doors that open and slide out of sight, to hold the printer, shelves for folders and a couple of hanging file drawers.”

Designer Kellie Murray built her home office in one end of the built-in wardrobes in her children’s toy room.

“The doors are on a 180-degree hinge so they open right up,” she says. “Inside there’s a desk, and a heap of shelves with all my catalogues and folders with my client’s information. Built-in downlighting is important too, and holes drilled in the back of the desk to hide the computer cables.”

Kellie says the key is designing exactly the amount and type of storage you’ll need. “You have to look at what you’ll be using the space for,” she says. “And it should look tidy and be easy to keep neat, with a place for everything.”

If you don’t want the expense of custom-built cabinetry, you can buy all-in-one workstations from retailers like Ikea, Freedom and Officeworks. But make sure they’re in a material that works with the rest of your living space.

Another option is to use a partition or screen to hide a home office in the corner of a room.

“You could use sheer curtains hung from the ceiling to divide the space,” says designer Corrina Anderson-Allsop, of Creative Space Interiors. “You can close them off for privacy or keep them open, and they add a lovely, luxurious feel to the space.”