home office furniture

A room that does two jobs

An office in a building is allowed to look like an office all day. A room in a house is not, because somebody sleeps in it, eats in it or watches something in it once work ends. That is why the pieces worth buying for a home office are the ones that fold flat, roll out of sight, close their fronts or simply do not announce themselves as work equipment. The failure mode is the opposite: an excellent desk that turns a bedroom into a permanent workplace and never lets it be anything else.

• Folding beats compact. A foldable desk disappears entirely, where a small one is still a desk in the corner on Saturday.
• Casters beat placement. A file cabinet on wheels is furniture you can put away rather than furniture you have to live with.
• A closing front hides the day. A desk with a hutch or a doored cabinet resets the room in about four seconds.
• Some of it should not look like office equipment. A farmhouse file cabinet reads as a sideboard to anybody who does not open it.

Power is the thing nobody plans

A dedicated office has outlets where a desk goes. A spare bedroom has one socket behind the bed and another behind the door. Whatever you buy, work out how the cables reach it before it arrives, because the usual outcome is a good desk positioned wrongly for the rest of its life to stay near an outlet.

• Check the wall before the desk. Where the sockets are decides where the desk can go more than the room's shape does.
• Built in charging removes one problem. Some of these pieces carry USB ports, which takes the phone and the headset off the extension lead.
• Leave a cable route. A desk pushed flat against a wall traps everything behind it and makes the sockets unreachable.

The chair is the only piece you are touching

Almost everything here is surface and storage, and you can be wrong about any of them and simply live with it. The exception is the chair, and being wrong about that is felt within a week. It is the one piece in the room in continuous contact with a body for six to eight hours, which puts it in a different category from everything around it however similar the prices look.

• Surfaces tolerate a compromise. A desk that is slightly wrong is an inconvenience rather than a problem.
• A chair does not. Hours of contact turn a small mistake into a daily one.
• Buy the chair last and separately. It is the piece least worth matching to anything else in the room.

Sorted by what they solve

Sorting by problem rather than by product type makes the shelf quicker to read, because most people arrive with a constraint rather than a shopping list.

• Working surface. Standing, L shaped, hutch, executive and two person options make up the largest group on the shelf.
• Paper and files. File cabinets, some of them mobile, for the part of the job that still arrives on paper.
• Tight corners. The foldable and compact options are the ones that work in a corner of a bedroom without taking the room over.
• Sitting. An ergonomic chair, and the argument above for treating it separately.
• Somewhere else entirely. If the desk is going at one end of a living room, the pieces that fold or close matter more than the ones that store.