Home Office Design

If you are planning to setup a Home office, then these guidelines will save your time and money from the planning stage itself. A home office is primarily has two kinds of setups.

1) Office in an entirely new room in a home

2) A small part of the room converted into a home office.

Both these types have their own advantages and disadvantages. Before you dive into planning and setting up a home office it would be nice to first find out what exactly are you looking for from your office space.

The actual plan of the office space largely depends upon the kind of business you are in. Many types of businesses can be run today from home. But you must first analyze the amount of space required to run a business from home.

You can create a sort of FAQ for yourself to answer some basic questions like following.

1) How many people will accompany you in your office?

2) What is the expected growth of your business as far as revenue generation and hence number of employees is concerned?

3) Does your business involves frequent meeting with clients or presentations, just like in a seminar hall.

4) Does your business involve physical inventory of products?

5) Does your business involve relationships with foreign clients?

6) How many hours per day do you work normally?

7) How many kids do you have?

If you find the answers to these and similar questions you will find that they directly affect the location of your office in your home. For example if the answer to question number 5 above is yes,( about foreign clients), then are you going to work overnight to get along with the communication required with clients in other countries. Then how will this affect the privacy of other family members.

Another point is if your kids are small, how will you protect your office stationery and other things such a computers and other documents away from their reach. You know, kids like to learn new things and a home office is a nice place to explore their curiosity. In this case are you going to use a half partition or other methods to segregate the office space from rest of the home.

As recently as the early 90’s the home office meant a company’s headquarters. If you worked in an office at home people figured you’d been laid off, or if they were charitable they assumed you were a freelancer.

Now more about 30 million Americans are working from home at least part time, and 70% of those people have a home office or designated workstations in their homes. In fact, home offices ranked as the fourth most important feature in a new upscale home according to a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders.

New technologies such as wifi, teleconferencing software, and powerful personal computers have helped enable the telecommuting and work at home trend, but a host of design options are part of the reason for the change too.

It used to be that your choice was cheap (but not necessarily inexpensive) modular office furniture from Staples or a huge desk from a high-end furniture store. Now cabinet makers are creating custom built home office spaces, and many interior designers are willing to take on one room at a time.

At the high end, men in particular, are creating “testosterone rooms” with touches of grandeur and big plasma screen for watching football games with buddies. For a mere $20,000 Hooker Furniture will sell you a wrap around the room home office set with a built-in look including a matching desk and chair, a computer hutch, a bookcase, a credenza, an entertainment center large enough for a 60-inch flat-screen television, and a bar cabinet.

For some reason women never had a place to work and had to use the end of the kitchen counter or a small desk in the guest bedroom, but not any more. Some women have added a room devote entirely to their work, away from areas used by the kids.

A key to making a space suitable for work is adequate storage. Something as simple as a filing cabinet where you can keep your work will make a real difference in productivity. Office Depot knows more than half its customers are women, and that the number of businesses owned by women are growing twice as fast as others, so they’ve added several lines of furniture designed specifically for women.