Designing the Home Office
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| photo: Eric Diesel |
The breadth of Los Angeles is the cultural core of America's second largest city. LA evolved along the geophysical fault lines that account for verdant farm land, rocky green hills, and oil all being located in this promised land between desert and ocean. Communities, known to Angelinos as pockets, nestle, crowd and luxuriate within physical boundaries that are defined by lifestyle as well as zip code. This is especially true in and around Hollywood, which leads to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Century City, Santa Monica, Westwood, Studio City, North Hollywood, Burbank, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Downtown, Glendale and Pasadena, to name a few and each of which then leads further out. And the most important thing about this topography, which along with suntans and the movies is what everyone automatically associates with LA? There's a lot of space to fill, and that's as true of the home as of the highway.
The openness of western space commands rethinking spatial flow. Urbanites who are used to thinking vertically discover, sometimes as a surprise, that it requires adjustment to think horizontally in this different urbanity. It seems obvious when we see it written out, but as it's happening we don't necessarily notice that environment shapes our perceptions. In Manhattan, the skyscrapers and bustle are both enervating and focusing; you have to adapt to the sheer volume of the crowds and the soaring scale of the architecture. This was one of the reasons we settled in Astoria. It had a courtly, old world vibe, of neighborhood pride and small businesses and apartments with some space in them.
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| photo: Eric Diesel |
In every way from record-keeping to paying bills, the home office is the business hub of the household. As work in the home cannot help but be personal, the home office is one area that cannot help but reflect the personalities of the users. Because most families, ours included, share home office space, the home office can easily take on a slapdash quality, but with smart design the home office can minimize busy-ness while being conducive to business. Even if you don't have room to spare, you still have room for an office. Home offices can be as formal as separate business quarters annexed onto the home and as informal as a commandeered corner of the dining room table.
Appropriately for a medical professional and a writer, the home office is one of the key rooms in our urban home. In our cross-country move, the most challenging room to pack was the home office. There were as many memories as books in that room. The office was the focus of one of the most successful columns from when Urban Home Blog was written from Astoria. In that office was situated the writer's window so often referred in those Astoria columns. While it was very well organized, that office was cramped, befitting the brownstone intelligentsia that any New Yorker would recognize and feel right at home with. When I wrote about that home office, I had no idea that just a few years hence, I'd be revisiting the home office both by setting one up and designing one, in a location that is diametric to New York City in every way from weather to scale.
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| photograph: Eric Diesel |
If the scale of Los Angeles living provides context for this home office, these magickal birds provide inspiration. I placed raven silhouettes on the wall, in stances from perched in watchfulness to flapping in protection. Some misinterpret the raven's cry as menace but it really a cry of connection between worlds external and interior. In this room of industry and inspiration, we always want to be in touch with the raven's otherworldly cry.
The message of these birds is appropriate to a work room where the outdoors enters through the windows. To facilitate welcoming the outdoors inside, we hung simple metal Venetian blinds in a shade of dark coffee. Window blinds don't crowd a room with fuss, which is an important consideration in a room that is already busy with work. Blinds operate simply, welcoming invigorating sunshine into the room with the pull of a cord. Properly slanted, the blinds suffuse the office with the golden late day sun every Angelino treasures and, later still, limns the room with moonlight.
Other design elements in the room include John's collection of vintage medical equipment and the haunted houses and witches that I collect, but the core functions of this room are work and study. Books, of course, are the foundation of those, and the room is lined with sturdy wooden shelves, attached to the walls as part of standard earthquake-proofing, painted espresso and housing our prized library. We have enough shelf space for showcase shelves, where are arranged vignettes of our favorite subject areas. Beatnik figurines huddle around my collection of Beat literature, daddy-o, including recordings of Kerouac reading his poetry and my prized pulp copy of On the Road. The Homekeeper's Library showcases the vintage homekeeping books that are among my passions, including my beloved Better Homes and Gardens Sewing Book. Our regular trips to Central Coast wine country feed not just our thirst for great wine but my passion for vintage books with its selection of great used bookstores. During periods when we can't get away, we live walking distance to the great foraging bookstore The Cosmopolitan Bookshop.
Organizing and caring for books is the firmament of a home library. Like a public library, a home library is a place of research, learning, pleasure and history. It is also a serious responsibility. In their way, books are fragile, and the techniques librarians and archivists use to store, protect, and utilize them are as important to the home library as they are to the circulating one. Each family has its own way of managing the home library, from a pile of picture books in the playroom to a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen, from texts inherited from school days to paperbacks collected during years of pleasure reading. Whether you have a few titles or a formal library, books in the home should be organized and shelved. While no bookworm could argue with arranging home books according to Dewey, most home libraries don't require that formal of a system. We organize books broadly by subject, drilling down one or two levels for some subject areas. Within that, we shelve by title for non-fiction and author's last name for fiction. As arduous as this sounds, each title is entered into a simple Excel spreadsheet that includes columns for date/place purchased, cost and value. This is especially important as John's medical texts and my Homekeeper's Library constitute professional investments, and some of the titles in our library are rare or otherwise valuable.
All books are sensitive to moisture and dust, and while in some cases a book binder can save a fragile volume, usually once a book is damaged by such agents as water or mold, it will continue to deteriorate and at most, only parts of it can be salvaged. Especially in a room where the windows are opened, dust once a week utilizing a static duster. Utilize an extension to reach top shelves. Dust the tops and the spines of the books, as well as the visible shelf surface. Every month to six weeks depending on the conditions in the room, use the vacuum cleaner outfitted with the dusting brush and crevice tool to vacuum the shelves. Rare, older or otherwise valuable books require special care to remain viable. Wrap vintage books, whether jacketed or not, with protective dust jacket covers. Take exceptional care with very rare or valuable books. Wrap them in acid free tissue and store them in book boxes. Handle them properly as determined by each title's value and condition, even if it means using gloves, a soft brush, and a page turner. For these titles, it is especially important to maintain good records regarding their history and valuation.
One item of furniture that didn't make the trip cross-country was the knock together desk we were using in that home office. Finding a desk was one of our priorities as we set up our new home office in Los Angeles. As a veteran of corporate work stations, I initially sought a modifiable work environment cube unit, which can be configured to the needs of the worker. While these are obtainable for the home market, the more I looked at them, the more I realized that they were outside of the purposes the desk in our office needed to serve. We needed a desk that was flexible to accommodate the work of two individuals, one of them a working writer, and that agreed with the scope of the room it would be in. Though I liked the capacity to configure work station units, that adaptability came at the cost of constriction of size. That makes sense; these units are originally and primarily intended for corporate environments, where every inch of space is a cost and therefore is an investment that must be maximized. It would have been a disservice to the luxury of space not to utilize our home office space to its best advantage. Like any room in the home, but especially working rooms (think of kitchen, bathroom, garage), the design of the home office must lend itself to the room's purpose. That is the challenge of home design and also its excitement: that each environment be the best expression of itself.
For the desk, I harkened back to another working chapter of my life: sewing costumes in a professional costume shop. In costume shops, work tables must be large enough that large swathes of fabric can be laid out on them. Accordingly, they are typically 60 or 120 inches long (the length of one or two tape measures) by 36 or 48 inches wide (the length of one yardstick or one yardstick plus one ruler). These dimensions turned out to be the ideal size for a desk top. At Ikea we found the perfect compromise: slabs of table top to attach legs to. And so we found and assembled our desk, whose size -- roughly that of a dining room table -- accommodates both the work and the supplies required for it.
While we were at it, we obtained an affordable reclining and pivoting desk chair. From this, there is room under the sizable desk surface for me to stretch out my legs when I write. Perhaps TMI, but it is a great benefit to me and one I didn't have in the smaller NYC office. There is no danger I will inadvertently kick the computer tower or the cords leading from it, which are tagged by function and rolled, bound and gathered in a wire basket drilled to the underside of the desk. To further free desk top space, in lieu of a standard monitor, we took a cue from the Urban Home Blog guide to home electronics and hung a flat screen tv that was aging out of use on the wall to use as a computer monitor.
Below the desk is a rolling file cabinet whose contents I manage with adherence to the hard and fast rule of "two in the drawer three in the cabinet" that I learned during fifteen plus years as an office worker. Older records are scanned onto hard and thumb drives, with paper records, when necessary, stored safely away in snap-top plastic boxes. On the desk top, vintage wire baskets painted dull gold and black leather boxes organize papers and files. At antique shops and tag sales I am always on the lookout for vintage dressing table trays, especially those that are Halloween themed. I use these to hold paper clips, note pads, and other small office supplies. The desk is lit by a mid-century lamp in Florentine gold. That touch of gold is echoed in the placement, on a shelf to the left, of the gold nameplate from my desk in the executive suite of my corporate days.
The club furniture that we invested in in New York anchors the Los Angeles home office at its center, commanding stature without crowding the room. Club sofa and chair in espresso leather are placed in an ell, with the open end of the ell facing the door while providing a corridor along the shelves to the focal point of the open window. Design books rest on a round coffee table that echoes the geometric forms of lampshades, clock faces and pin lights that break up the square angles of the room. The titles on display are changed regularly, and include titles written about in the popular Urban Home feature Homekeeper's Library. These are perused by a wrought iron raven from one of my favorite LA design stores, its head appropriately cocked at the angle of curiosity.
Office design is the cohesion that synthesizes work, study, and functionality. Designing the home office means assessing the space available against the work and study that will happen there, and then realizing the best work space for those with fidelity to the users' work/study style and while utilizing the resources available. Resources include space, funds and effort, but also organizational ability and creativity. Though we often think otherwise, as a card-carrying aesthete I assure you that those last two are not exclusive of each other. A creative mind flourishes in a well-organized atmosphere, and organizational ability depends on creativity to see the possibilities.
The home office presents the ultimate design precept - form vs. function -- and when successful, resolves the dilemma with the great design truth that function and form are interdependent. They reflect each other while each meets its own specific obligations. That is of great service when designing the home office, for there is hardly a better definition of home design than freedom within constraint, and no better example of the symbiosis of the two than a home office that is both practical and personable.
Other design elements in the room include John's collection of vintage medical equipment and the haunted houses and witches that I collect, but the core functions of this room are work and study. Books, of course, are the foundation of those, and the room is lined with sturdy wooden shelves, attached to the walls as part of standard earthquake-proofing, painted espresso and housing our prized library. We have enough shelf space for showcase shelves, where are arranged vignettes of our favorite subject areas. Beatnik figurines huddle around my collection of Beat literature, daddy-o, including recordings of Kerouac reading his poetry and my prized pulp copy of On the Road. The Homekeeper's Library showcases the vintage homekeeping books that are among my passions, including my beloved Better Homes and Gardens Sewing Book. Our regular trips to Central Coast wine country feed not just our thirst for great wine but my passion for vintage books with its selection of great used bookstores. During periods when we can't get away, we live walking distance to the great foraging bookstore The Cosmopolitan Bookshop.
Organizing and caring for books is the firmament of a home library. Like a public library, a home library is a place of research, learning, pleasure and history. It is also a serious responsibility. In their way, books are fragile, and the techniques librarians and archivists use to store, protect, and utilize them are as important to the home library as they are to the circulating one. Each family has its own way of managing the home library, from a pile of picture books in the playroom to a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen, from texts inherited from school days to paperbacks collected during years of pleasure reading. Whether you have a few titles or a formal library, books in the home should be organized and shelved. While no bookworm could argue with arranging home books according to Dewey, most home libraries don't require that formal of a system. We organize books broadly by subject, drilling down one or two levels for some subject areas. Within that, we shelve by title for non-fiction and author's last name for fiction. As arduous as this sounds, each title is entered into a simple Excel spreadsheet that includes columns for date/place purchased, cost and value. This is especially important as John's medical texts and my Homekeeper's Library constitute professional investments, and some of the titles in our library are rare or otherwise valuable.
 |
| photo: Eric Diesel |
One item of furniture that didn't make the trip cross-country was the knock together desk we were using in that home office. Finding a desk was one of our priorities as we set up our new home office in Los Angeles. As a veteran of corporate work stations, I initially sought a modifiable work environment cube unit, which can be configured to the needs of the worker. While these are obtainable for the home market, the more I looked at them, the more I realized that they were outside of the purposes the desk in our office needed to serve. We needed a desk that was flexible to accommodate the work of two individuals, one of them a working writer, and that agreed with the scope of the room it would be in. Though I liked the capacity to configure work station units, that adaptability came at the cost of constriction of size. That makes sense; these units are originally and primarily intended for corporate environments, where every inch of space is a cost and therefore is an investment that must be maximized. It would have been a disservice to the luxury of space not to utilize our home office space to its best advantage. Like any room in the home, but especially working rooms (think of kitchen, bathroom, garage), the design of the home office must lend itself to the room's purpose. That is the challenge of home design and also its excitement: that each environment be the best expression of itself.
For the desk, I harkened back to another working chapter of my life: sewing costumes in a professional costume shop. In costume shops, work tables must be large enough that large swathes of fabric can be laid out on them. Accordingly, they are typically 60 or 120 inches long (the length of one or two tape measures) by 36 or 48 inches wide (the length of one yardstick or one yardstick plus one ruler). These dimensions turned out to be the ideal size for a desk top. At Ikea we found the perfect compromise: slabs of table top to attach legs to. And so we found and assembled our desk, whose size -- roughly that of a dining room table -- accommodates both the work and the supplies required for it.
While we were at it, we obtained an affordable reclining and pivoting desk chair. From this, there is room under the sizable desk surface for me to stretch out my legs when I write. Perhaps TMI, but it is a great benefit to me and one I didn't have in the smaller NYC office. There is no danger I will inadvertently kick the computer tower or the cords leading from it, which are tagged by function and rolled, bound and gathered in a wire basket drilled to the underside of the desk. To further free desk top space, in lieu of a standard monitor, we took a cue from the Urban Home Blog guide to home electronics and hung a flat screen tv that was aging out of use on the wall to use as a computer monitor.
Below the desk is a rolling file cabinet whose contents I manage with adherence to the hard and fast rule of "two in the drawer three in the cabinet" that I learned during fifteen plus years as an office worker. Older records are scanned onto hard and thumb drives, with paper records, when necessary, stored safely away in snap-top plastic boxes. On the desk top, vintage wire baskets painted dull gold and black leather boxes organize papers and files. At antique shops and tag sales I am always on the lookout for vintage dressing table trays, especially those that are Halloween themed. I use these to hold paper clips, note pads, and other small office supplies. The desk is lit by a mid-century lamp in Florentine gold. That touch of gold is echoed in the placement, on a shelf to the left, of the gold nameplate from my desk in the executive suite of my corporate days.
The club furniture that we invested in in New York anchors the Los Angeles home office at its center, commanding stature without crowding the room. Club sofa and chair in espresso leather are placed in an ell, with the open end of the ell facing the door while providing a corridor along the shelves to the focal point of the open window. Design books rest on a round coffee table that echoes the geometric forms of lampshades, clock faces and pin lights that break up the square angles of the room. The titles on display are changed regularly, and include titles written about in the popular Urban Home feature Homekeeper's Library. These are perused by a wrought iron raven from one of my favorite LA design stores, its head appropriately cocked at the angle of curiosity.
Office design is the cohesion that synthesizes work, study, and functionality. Designing the home office means assessing the space available against the work and study that will happen there, and then realizing the best work space for those with fidelity to the users' work/study style and while utilizing the resources available. Resources include space, funds and effort, but also organizational ability and creativity. Though we often think otherwise, as a card-carrying aesthete I assure you that those last two are not exclusive of each other. A creative mind flourishes in a well-organized atmosphere, and organizational ability depends on creativity to see the possibilities.
The home office presents the ultimate design precept - form vs. function -- and when successful, resolves the dilemma with the great design truth that function and form are interdependent. They reflect each other while each meets its own specific obligations. That is of great service when designing the home office, for there is hardly a better definition of home design than freedom within constraint, and no better example of the symbiosis of the two than a home office that is both practical and personable.
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