If your career is focused around creating inspiring spaces, it only makes sense that your workspace fosters your own creativity. In this post, I’ll walk you through my wife’s work from home desk setup, and tell you how she recently redesigned her home office space to be bright, colorful and inviting.
My wife is a professional interior designer and while an important aspect of her job is making spaces visually appealing, it is equally important they be functional. For her own home workspace, the goal was to turn a very bland and basic spare room into a home office that is efficient, functional, and creatively inspiring.
The most impactful visual element of the space is the graphic black & white wallpaper, which creates a bold backdrop to contrast the colourful art. The gallery wall above the desk includes an eclectic mix of pieces that further reflects the combination of bright colours with black & white.
The desktop my wife chose is a 79” Ikea Linnmon. While this is a budget conscious tabletop, the primary reason she selected this desk is for its length. There is enough space to dedicate one side to office work while the other half can act as a worktop for art and DIY projects.
Being that my wife’s job keeps her on the go, she primarily works from an older model Dell XPS laptop provided by her employer. With her workflow centered around this laptop, we chose peripherals and accessories which would make switching back and forth from her laptop to the desktop PC more efficient.
To make her laptop setup more ergonomic, she opted to use a laptop riser. The good folks at Grovemade kindly provided their Maple Laptop Riser for this space. Like all of Grovemade’s products, this riser has a premium feel and finish. With my wife intentionally curating the aesthetic of her space, this riser with its maple wood accents was the perfect compliment to her setup. The subtle use of natural wood elements throughout the desk area adds warmth and texture to the space.
In maintaining the minimalist design of this setup, we opted to tuck her desktop PC neatly behind the right filing cabinet. For her primary display, she is using a Dell 24” IPS monitor on a single monitor arm. For most of the work day, my wife extends her laptop display to the Dell monitor for extra screen real-estate. To allow her to conveniently switch the Dell monitor back and forth between the laptop and her desktop PC, we added an HDMI switch box to toggle between PCs. The main reason we chose this switcher is that it includes a remote control to change inputs. Due to this switch being controlled by a remote, I Velcro mounted the box under the desk to keep it out of the way.
In the same vein as the HDMI switch, my wife uses a UGreen 4 port USB switcher to swap her mouse and keyboard between her laptop and desktop PC with the push of a button. The hub connects to both the laptop and desktop PC via the 2 USB ports on the back of the switch, while peripherals connect via USB to the front side of the 4-port hub. While they do sell KVM switches that feature both HDMI and USB switching in one unit, I haven’t found one that has lasted longer than a month. So far, using the two separate switchers is working with no issues.
The mouse being used is the Logitech G703 gaming mouse in a black and white colorway to match the overall aesthetic of the set up. The keyboard is the Keychron K4 V2 with a set of custom keycaps. Having wireless peripherals is essential for this setup as my wife continuously shuffles large paper documents around her desk and having a cable free surface is important for her.
With the Linnmon desktop being prone to scuffing, an oversized desk mat is a must for this surface. Grovemade sent over their Matte Navy blue desk pad in size medium for this setup. The color of this pad ties in with the other blue accessories throughout the space. This is a quality desk pad that’s well made and durable. My wife appreciates that she’s also able to use it as a writing surface, which is ideal when marking up drawings and blueprints.
For audio, I equipped this setup with a stereo pair of Gallo Acoustic Micro speakers which are powered by the Topping MX3 amplifier.
Other notable items used include a generic phone stand which matches the other silver accents on the desktop, a Grovemade pen cup which coordinates with the laptop stand and other wood accents throughout the space, and lastly a Steelcase Leap V2 office chair.
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