The Ideal Home Office Is Lacking One Thing
Sure it’s remotely functional, but does it make your brain happy?
Beauty at the office should be everyday.

Through all the worry and madness of the last 18 months, there is one enormous upside for millions of people. And one big downside. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics roughly 42% of the working population in America, now works from home, reducing the stress of the daily commute from 10 hours a week in traffic to 10 seconds.
Great! But is that enough? We would argue not really. Think on it for a minute. For most of us, traffic to work is like a kind of prison with, of course, sudden death as one distinct possibility. Getting out of one prison only to find yourself in another one, your own home office isn’t much of a consolation.

Mini self-assessment
Do your own mini self-assessment. What does your undesigned, impromptu home office environment look like? Feel like? Function like?
- How often are you interrupted during the day?
- Do you have privacy, both visual and auditory?
- Do you have a view of nature that inspires you and adds to your dopamine levels?
- Do the colors in your room give you a sense of calm and focus?
- Is your work area ergonomic?
- Do you have any natural sunlight?
And the big one, if money and time were no object, what would you change about the way your home office is designed?


None of these rooms were built for visual or auditory privacy, proper work surface configuration, technology, or ergonomically correct accessibility to devices or storage. And none of them were designed for the kind of beauty you need.

What do evolutionary psychologists say?
According to The Caveman’s Guide to Building a Better Office by Ron Friedman, even planned offices usually don’t get it right…
"It’s not hard for the evolutionary psychologist to see why so many offices fail to engage their employees. Depriving people of sunlight, restricting their views, and seating them with their backs exposed is not a recipe for success—it’s a recipe for chronic anxiety.
We tend to assume that employee engagement is about the work, that so long as we give talented people challenging tasks and the tools to excel, they will be happy. But that formula is incomplete. Our mind responds to the signals in our environment. And the less comfortable we are while doing our work, the fewer cognitive resources we have available. And this is why design ultimately matters."
Clinical psychologists suggest that there should be at least one room in your home that is dedicated to beauty—for restorative psychological health. Shouldn’t that space be the one you spend the most time in?
So, if you’re going to office from home, more or less permanently, consider it as an opportunity to make that space so incredibly useful and beautiful that you can be both impressively productive and cognitively healthy at the same time. Don’t just get by. Get going with beauty.
We're here for a free consult anytime.
"We do not merely want to see beauty...we want something else that can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it."