So, how do you design a functional, charming and stylish home office that fits in to a mid-century-sized house?
Mid-century homes weren’t originally built with home offices in mind, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a workspace that fits seamlessly into your home’s aesthetic.
Ask yourself: What type of work do you do at home? Will you need complete sound privacy, a dedicated space for Zoom calls, or just a cozy corner for occasional emails? Tailor your design to your specific requirements, whether it’s a fully outfitted office or a flexible, multi-use space.
A great home office has both visual and sound privacy. Consider adding a door to close off your workspace or soundproofing measures like acoustic panels. Natural light is essential for productivity, so position your desk near a window if possible, and layer task lighting for evening work.
Invest in an ergonomic chair and desk setup that fits your needs, whether you prefer sitting, standing, or both. Ensure your office has enough outlets for all your devices, and keep your Zoom background clean and professional.
Don’t have an extra room? Combine functions!
A guest room can double as an office (in the right circumstances), or you can transform a closet into a compact workspace.
For those who prefer flexibility, set up multiple work zones throughout the house to match different tasks or moods.
Designing a home office doesn’t have to mean reinventing the wheel. With thoughtful planning, you can create a workspace that’s functional, stylish, and perfectly tailored to your mid-century home.
Quick Design tip for your…Holiday Shopping
It’s the holiday season, so why not support small businesses that specialize in mid-century design? Check out Episode 1007 for a curated list of my favorite mid-century vendors and makers, or grab the Mid-Century Ranch Resources List for more inspiration.
Looking for a great gift idea? Consider the new book Alexander Girard: Let the Sun In—it’s a feast for the eyes and a must-have for any mid-century lover!
Or grab a whole book list (plus a bunch of other great must have Mid-Century Ranch Resources) right here!
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
The Kitchen Desk
Remember those charming little desks built into mid-century kitchens? Originally designed as a spot for managing household paperwork, calendars, and recipe cards, they’re a nostalgic nod to a time when home management was a full-time job.
While many of these desks have disappeared in modern renovations, they can still be incredibly functional. Use one as a charging station, a homework nook, or even a mini workspace for casual tasks. Love them or hate them, kitchen desks are a quintessential feature of mid-century homes worth reconsidering.
Listen Now On
Resources
- Shop small this season. Need some ideas? Listen to Episode 1007!
- Missed the live Masterclass last month? Catch “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” in replay!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
Do you? Have you? Will you ever work from home? Many of my clients these days need some home office space designed into their master plan, whether because they need to do a little overflow work in the evenings and they want a good space to do that, or because one or both of the homeowners work entirely out of their house. Does that sound like you? It’s more and more common.
Della Hansmann
So today’s episode is going to give you some great advice on what to ask yourself and what features to make sure you don’t leave out of your home office space when you’re planning a remodel of your mid-century home. I’ll also be shouting out a great mid-century vintage feature, the kitchen desk, which had a place for the recipe card files, the wall calendar and the kitchen wall phone.
Della Hansmann
Do you love it or do you hate it? Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast.
Della Hansmann
You’re listening to Episode 1910, all right, given that it is in the middle of December, your tip, your resource, your marching order for this week is go out and support small, local, mid-century oriented businesses this holiday season. If you need more advice than that, check out Episode 1007 for a list of some of my favorite mid-century small businesses, or grab my mid-century ranch resource list for a range of MCM appropriate products, places and people, plus a non-comprehensive list of great books on mid-century design, designers and history.
Della Hansmann
One that is not on the list, but I’ll be adding soon, is the new book published by Phaedon Alexander Girard, let the sun in by Tom Oldham and Kira coffee. It is absolutely gorgeous, and it runs the story of his life against the work that he was doing throughout it with these gorgeous pictures. I was really fascinated today thinking about today’s podcast topic by the office designs he did for detrola, Detroit communications company in the 1940s he was originally hired as a product designer designed the shapes of the record players and radios that they were producing, but ended up redesigning their office spaces, even their manufacturing workspace and the office, the desk, the setups, the displays that he designed are absolutely gorgeous.
Della Hansmann
I’ll maybe I’ll put a few snaps of the pages into my Instagram story today, and so you can check it out. But I highly recommend this book. I’ll be adding it to my resources list as soon as I update it again, and not to focus too much on myself, but I do truly believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself, give to a loved one, give to your mid-century home, is the magic of thoughtful design.
Della Hansmann
You and your partner might decide to gift each other a master plan for the upcoming year, or you can surprise someone you know and love with an half hour design consult from me. To make that happen. You just go to mid mod dash midwest.com/call, and fill out the consult form as if it was for yourself with a note that this is a gift you don’t necessarily know the subject of their call question, and it’ll ask you to select a time, just pick a time in January, and then send us an email we’ll arrange to reschedule with your gift at the date of their choosing.
Della Hansmann
All right, since we are talking about the design of offices, the design for offices, books you might put in offices. That leads us right into our topic for today. You can grab, by the way, the show notes with a transcript of this episode and the links to the photos I’m going to have and any other resources I mentioned at midmod-midwest.com/ 1910, but let’s get right into it.
Della Hansmann
Home offices are something that not every mid-century house had, because the mid-century era was a time when there was a lot more of a distinct separation between work done outside the house, and of course, there was always domestic labor, but that didn’t necessarily require an office space. Home was a place for rest, sleep, play, socializing. These days, however, we have blurred the lines, and one of the key areas I am often asked to assign in my master plans for clients is a better home office space.
Della Hansmann
Now, in some cases, a home office is simply one of the designated bedrooms, but when there are more people in the house than bedrooms, or when there’s a particular type of work that needs to be done, or when two adults in the house both need to have home office space as well as private bedroom space, and they need sound separation from each other so they can have personal and professional calls, we start to get into some design issues.
Della Hansmann
So I’ll start right here at the top by just outlining what I think of as ground rules for a good home office design. These might be applicable no matter what scale of space you’re talking about, no matter whether you’re using this as your designated always office, or it’s just a place where you come home and do a little bit of extra work at the end of the evening, you’re going to need some amount of surface area, a functional home office space has the flat spaces that you can set up and get things done.
Della Hansmann
So that might mean room for a laptop, possibly an external monitor, maybe two monitors, perhaps a standing desk, certainly an ergonomic, friendly chair. That is the appropriate height for your desk, and appropriate lighting for you to see by and be seen by in this zoom oriented era. So you’ll also be needing to sit a desk chair, ideally set up to match the height of the desk, but possibly also a reading chair and or space for someone else to come in and sit with you, to visit to work with you. You might need a place for clients to come by and meet with you.
Della Hansmann
You’re going to need to think about your view and the view of you when you’re in the office. What are you looking at? A window, a view, a wall covered in inspiration, perhaps something very blank so it doesn’t distract you many monitors. And then also think about what do other people see when they approach your office space. This can be important if you need to be able to focus and other people are going to be in the house at the time, particularly for parents of young kids, it might be important to be visually separate from the house.
Della Hansmann
Almost more importantly than sound separated from the house, so that kids aren’t going to wander by, see you through an open doorway or window, and then want to come talk to you. This can also be important, just for the point of view of other people in the house, for someone who really needs to focus on their work, having a chatty extrovert in the house, having a little bit of visual separation between you and them might be the difference between them popping by with a cup of coffee and a question every five minutes or coming in at designated coffee visiting lunch break times. You also want to think about view.
Della Hansmann
What will be the view of you through your computer? For many of us, Zoom meetings are an essential part of work from home, that’s maybe the consideration of why you’re working, not in an office space you need to be able to have digital communications. So then you’re thinking about what is the view of you in terms of good lighting on your face and also what’s happening behind you.
Della Hansmann
Thinking about lighting in general is part of the question of a good office design. You want task lighting that lets you work in any season, in the dark, in the evening, but also access to natural light, if possible. I’m a big believer in having natural light in every part of your home, and certainly in an office where you’re going to spend most of the daytime, you want to have access to a skylight, a light tube, ideally, a view of the sky.
Della Hansmann
This is more than just an esthetic consideration. Many studies have shown that people have better health outcomes, more focus and more productivity when they work in an office. Many of these studies were done when we worked in offices, but they still hold for your own home when we work in an office that has plenty of daylight, all right, we already talked about privacy of views, you’re definitely going to need to think about privacy for sound. Ask yourself, what you need sound privacy for?
Della Hansmann
Do you need it for professionalism, as in, you don’t want people to be able to overhear the conversations you have in your telephone or Zoom calls. Or do you need privacy so that you can create a quiet environment for focus, or possibly, as I’m doing right now, to use your office as a recording area for audio. You do need to be free from interruptions, but you also need to be able to control the general sound level.
Della Hansmann
And I’ll talk a little bit about the technology and the design that you can incorporate into that one less thing that is less and less important is storage for an office space. We have less and less paperwork requirements in our lives, although we need more and more of a digital footprint, but you may still need access to a printer, files of paperwork, extra bits of technology, reference books.
Della Hansmann
While the post pandemic zoom era does leave many of us knowing that we can grab our laptop and set up anywhere, it’s also really valuable to recognize what are the features that are real boon to productivity? What slows you down to have to go out of the house or go out of the room to do something else, and what can you do most effectively when you have all of your necessary objects, tools, aids, in arms, reach.
Della Hansmann
I think of the home office as something that is really a harbinger of changing lifestyle trends. This, I think first was really hammered hold for me in a consult call I had several months ago where the client wanted to chat with me for half an hour about the esthetic considerations of some changes they were making. I think the actual topic of our conversation was how to match exterior trim to their new paint choice.
But the reason that they needed to make that change was that they were rearranging a lot of the spaces in their house in order to cut down their two car garage into a one car to borrow more living space so that they could create a home office from what had been an extra bedroom, so that two adults could work from home and they could still have a personal bedroom and a guest space.
Della Hansmann
This was one couple with no kids that needed desperately needed four bedrooms in their house. This is fascinating, because in the era that the mid-century homes were built, they were often two or three at most bedroom spaces, even for families that had 234, kids. But now that we have smaller families, we are sometimes needing more bedroom footprints, not necessarily to put individual people into each bedroom, but to have you. A workspace at home.
Della Hansmann
Another example that came up recently was a family with a stay at home dad and a working mom who had extra work to do evenings and weekends. Now she wanted to have a private, sound controlled space to get that work done, not at the chaos of the dining table, but she also didn’t want to go down where she was currently going into the basement office cut off from life of the family and feeling totally separate.
Della Hansmann
So we were planning a small addition off the back of their ranch house. It was going to contain two primary functions, one, social space to kind of project out from the kitchen and connect better to the backyard play area for the whole family to hang out in, and two adjacent to that, a small close, but closed off office so she could go in there and get work done and then throw the door open and join into the family fun. There are a lot of different reasons to site an office outside of a bedroom, but in a house where you’ve got more bedrooms than people, particularly, you’ve got more bedrooms than people and a guest. It’s the easiest thing in the world to make one bedroom into an office.
Della Hansmann
You might want to give a little bit more thought to which bedroom that should be that gets to become the office, than just which is the empty bedroom right now. Think about having adjacent walls between a bedroom and a workspace. You can think about, is it better to have the office closer to social spaces in the house? In my own situation, my office shares a wall with a kitchen and actually has a door that goes directly into the kitchen as well as a door that goes into the hallway.
Della Hansmann
I was told by the home inspector who looked over my house with me when I moved in, that this was often called the nursery bedroom, because you could kind of keep an eye on things happening in the kitchen and then step through and peek into a sleeping kid. And I have seen a number of modest mid-century ranch houses that have this one of the three bedrooms in the house has two doors, one into a bedroom hallway and one directly into a social space. It also makes an auxiliary dining room or den. It adds a little bit of flexibility to the space.
Della Hansmann
But in modern life, this room often becomes the extra office. Now it’s slightly more complicated. When you’ve got two adults working from home, it’s harder to just say, well, we’ll have one office and we can both work in there. I have definitely had at least one client. I’m trying to think, no, maybe just one client. Tell me that two halves of a couple could share one room as an office space far more common. I’m told that we need total separation in this era of zoom meetings. We need privacy between the two.
Della Hansmann
We need focus privacy two people’s working styles and schedules shouldn’t overlap too much. So it might look like we need a little extra soundproofing between two spare bedrooms, or often it means one person is working in an extra bedroom or an office located in one corner of the house, and another person is working on the opposite end of the house or in another floor, main floor to downstairs. If we need to talk about adjacent spaces, that might mean two bedrooms next to each other, or it might also mean a bedroom on the main floor and a basement space below it. We do need to think about soundproofing.
Della Hansmann
This again, as I mentioned up at the top, when we ask questions about soundproofing, we want to think about what kind of sound control are we looking for? Are we creating privacy or just avoiding distractions? If you’re looking to avoid distractions, you might go into the full remodel to add more sound and solution to your house.
Della Hansmann
Or you could start by trying noise canceling headphones or a white noise machine. If you’re trying to keep any noise from going in or out of the space, particularly for issues of professional privacy, you might need to do a better job of muffling and limiting noise transmission. So in that case, you might consider closing or temporarily being able to block vents, sealing any air gaps that exist in the walls in the back of a closet, for example, adding door sweeps to the bottom of a door, or even a curtain that pulls across a closed doorway when it is closed.
Della Hansmann
You might think about adding acoustic foam panels inside the room, or building out the walls, furring them with a more solid separation. Now you can also think about when do you need sound privacy and why? I have actually worked on several projects recently where one parent’s home office was the bedroom of a child living in the house, and the child would go off to school in daycare, and the parent will move in and use the office side of the room. They just use the space differently at different times of the day.
Della Hansmann
This works particularly well for the kind of family that thinks of your bedroom as a place just where you sleep and then you move out of it for social play happens in the house, in the yard, outside of the bedroom. It’s not a solution for everyone, but it has been a very effectively used solution by a number of people, and this also lends itself to looking forward in time when you’re planning the spaces around your house.
Della Hansmann
We come back to master plan thinking, and we want to think about what is necessary right now and what will work in the near future and the realistic long term future. Yeah, particularly in houses where you’ve got a teenager who’s almost never at home, or you’ve got little kids who aren’t using the space very much. You want to look forward to what will be the next phase. Do you think that you are perhaps running a small business that may grow out of being housed in a bedroom and into its own outside the house space at around the time that a kid wants to claim more of their room?
Della Hansmann
Or if you’ve got a teenager that’s about to be moving out of the house into their own life, and you’re going to be an empty nester, you don’t necessarily want to do an addition project to get an office space when you could borrow it from some existing part of the house. Still, there are a lot of different conditions.
Della Hansmann
So when you’re again thinking about your lifestyle, thinking about the exact type of work that needs to happen in your at home workspace. You can also ask yourself, does it all need to happen in one dedicated area when you’re working, you’re always in your quote office, unquote, or do you actually want to fit the house out with several different types of working zones that might be used for different circumstances through the day, while a Zoom meeting might take place in a private space, a bedroom with a corner or a zoom background that seems professional, daily, sort of Office paperwork might take place in public, at a dining table. You might also want to think about the sort of focus and privacy question.
Della Hansmann
So how much do you need the structure of the space to do the heavy lifting of moderating family behavior. This I already mentioned. Do you need visual privacy so people don’t see you and want to interact with you? For many parents of medium age children, it is imperative to have a home office with a door that closes, perhaps even that locks. You need someone not to be able to walk by your workspace and peek in and want to start a conversation with you, it’s simply too disruptive.
Della Hansmann
I grew up with a mother who balanced a career as a feature writing journalist with being a remarkably present carpool mom to my sister and I, her office was in our 1970s era for split house. It was as you walked in the door from the garage, there was a little open space with a three quarter bath and then a view through to a walk out den, sort of a mudroom rec room space. You could go down the stairs into the actual basement den, or up the stairs into the living room, kitchen entry area, and the bedrooms were above that.
Della Hansmann
So to the right, small bathroom, to the left, open area with sliding doors out to the back patio. It also multitasked as the guest room and my mom’s office. So one of my parents first home improvement projects in that house was to wall off her office so she could close herself in there when she needed to focus, when she wasn’t working, we left the door open so we got that daylight view from the backyard windows into the garage, sort of vestibule area, but when she needed to work, she would round up my sister and I, let us know what she was doing and tell us she did not want to be disturbed unless there was blood or fire, and she would close the door.
Della Hansmann
Today, she still has a basement level office with a door. It’s necessary for her space to be off the beaten track of daily use and to have that closed door as a signal that she does not want to be disturbed. But since there aren’t little kids in the house anymore, the door is glass and it really is more of a signal than true privacy. It doesn’t create a whole lot of sound separation. It’s just that her desk faces away from the doorway, so she’s never distracted by people walking by. For myself, I live alone, and I certainly can’t close my dog away from my daily work.
Della Hansmann
She would kick up such a fuss, and although I do have the ability to close her into the mudroom by herself if I want an undistracted Zoom meeting. Generally, as I said, my office is the bedroom where I set up my laptop at a table, and I can close or open a door to the hallway. Right now it’s open so I can look out and see my Christmas tree in the living room, and the door behind me can open into the kitchen, where I can pop in and refresh my glass of tea anytime I want to.
Della Hansmann
I’m almost ashamed to admit how long it took me to set up this room as my office when I first moved into this house, I set up my laptop at the dining table, as many people did in the pandemic. But this was before then, as I started to grow this business into a full time operation, and then in employing having concern, I needed a space that I could close away from my personal life.
Della Hansmann
So this is another thing to consider. Mental separation. It’s not about privacy. For me. I’m the only adult, the only person in this house most of the time, but I don’t want to see my work when I’m getting up in the morning, when I’m going to bed at night, I say that, and actually, I leave the doors to my office open most of the time, and I’m just as likely to cut through from the bedroom wing to the kitchen by cutting through the office as I am through the living room, but I like to have the ability to close the doors and walk away. I don’t want to feel closed in myself.
Della Hansmann
But when I’m done for the day, I should, and do not always close down my computer equipment and all the attached worries so I can turn around and leave them behind. Certainly just having them in their own designated space means I don’t have to hold the emotional space of office when I’m not in it again, it’s important to think about the. Eye of an office space, when who will be using it and when?
Della Hansmann
I definitely know of other people who prefer to have a designated meeting office and then do most of their working at the dining table, because they are a more social person, and they do want to have those drop by conversations, the opportunity for someone to just walk by, make eye contact with them and smile, or to keep an eye on things that are happening throughout the house. If you have a forever home office but a backup workspace at home, you may need less designated area as a as an enclosed room of an office.
Della Hansmann
If you have an office where you do certain types of work and then you want to have more of that social experience in other periods of the day, you might want to set up a few other places, a comfortable space in your home where you can work after hours, to bang out a few last emails, write a few notes, follow up on replies.
Della Hansmann
The kind of homework that may not require its own dedicated space but could be set up in a corner of your kitchen, at the dining table, it might need less architecture and more furniture, a proper orientation of outlets, access to a printer, a little bit of storage, a place to slide your laptop away when it’s not in use. One classic mid-century solution for that type of problem was to have a little bit of a work from home office for Mom, sorry for the gender language, but that is how it tended to work.
Della Hansmann
Sometimes it was a home drafting space for another member of the House tucked into a closet in a guest room, or sometimes a closet right in the main den. The desk could stretch across the footprint of the closet area with room for a chair to be pushed flat against it and bi fold those to be closed in front of it. Another absolutely classic mid-century Design Workspace was the kitchen home office desk, and this was often a place where the kitchen wall phone was mounted a little bit of a flat surface that might be recipe card storage there.
Della Hansmann
It might be a place where the family calendar was kept. It might be a place where the budget was done, and we see still see these sort of remnant desks built into kitchens. They are often one of the first things people want to let go. But I think they’re an interesting design feature, and actually, I’ll be doing that as my feature at the week in just a moment, so I don’t need to dive too deeply into it right now. I wanted to bring up just one more type of Office planning, you might consider is that it might be helpful to have more than one office in your house, even for just one person or more than one type of workstation.
Della Hansmann
You yourself might enjoy being able to move from one place in the house to another, perhaps based on the time of day or the circumstance like I say, you might want a dedicated office where you can close the door and focus, but also a space where you can set up to do a little bit of light or necessary work while keeping an eye on something, on the kitchen, keeping tabs on the kid, or just enjoying a view to change up the pace of your day.
Della Hansmann
Another thing that may happen in this modern world is that someone who visits your house may need a workspace, and if you have an office you don’t want to share, either for privacy, sort of personal records reasons, or just because you’re using the office too, you might need to design another few workstations, or at least one into your home.
Della Hansmann
This is top of mind for me because my sister dropped by yesterday afternoon for an evening of making Christmas cookies. She conveniently came over after running a midafternoon errand, and we both still needed to do some more work before we could quit. So I stayed in my office, and she set up at the dining table to send those last few crucial emails.
Della Hansmann
Now, if she’d come over six months ago, well, one, we wouldn’t have been making Christmas cookies, but two, she could have worked in my second office, workstation with a desk, power outlets, lighting, zoom, background and privacy in the basement, bedroom, broom.
Della Hansmann
This has been used by my best friend when she visits from Seattle and stays for a week at a time as a remote office. But I recently decided to sacrifice it as an indoor exercise area. Hello, treadmill. So I need to come up with another solution if I have a longer term guest workspace need in my house, but for the moment, for less than an afternoon of work, the dining table works just fine.
Della Hansmann
So all of this has been a long winded episode to say you could just keep working at the kitchen table, but you might want to give a little more thought to what are the qualities of a good home office. So let’s reiterate one more time some of the key features of home office.
Della Hansmann
What does a great home office space need to be functional? You need some sort of flat surface, enough area to set up what you need to do, the right tech, the right paperwork and get things done, enough room to mouse room for a second monitor. Perhaps it has a benefit of ergonomics setup.
Della Hansmann
You certainly want it to be set up so you can sit neatly at it in a sitting position. You might also want a standing desk. It’s going to need a few key features, like appropriate lighting for you to see and be seen by in this zoom oriented era. And you’re going to need to think about what your zoom background, or at least a neutral, if not professional background, might be.
Della Hansmann
What do you look like on a video call, even if you don’t do them very often? Often, you may or may not need to control for both sound and privacy, and you might need to think about the audio pickup in your recording space. Even though offices require less paperwork these days, you might need a little bit of handy storage, maybe a printer, maybe some file space, maybe some extra bits of technology reference books. And certainly you want enough outlets easily accessible to plug in all of your various tech.
Della Hansmann
Let’s ask a few more questions. If you’re going to think about setting up a home space, I want you to ask yourself, what kind of work you’re doing at home? Does it need its own dedicated space? When space is limited, it might be useful to find certain parts of your house to multitask. The most common, perhaps obvious, solution is to combine a guest room and a home office.
Della Hansmann
Now this is obvious and it is common, but it does not work for everyone, so before you make this your plan, think about who comes to stay in your guest area and when they stay and for how long, when you have extended family in town, and you’re effectively on vacation for a long weekend. You don’t need an office space to get work done.
Della Hansmann
You can absolutely pair your office space with a hosting area, and you can just close away or put away the things in your work area. You can minimize the nature, the working nature, of the space, so it feels more like a home away from home, your friends and family. But it’s not going to be a conflict, but if you’re likely to have guests come and stay for a week when someone in the household is still continuing to work or for longer, some people who have overseas guests or parents come for months at a time, for longer than your vacation time periods, it may not work well at all to pair guest space with your home working space.
Della Hansmann
So as counterintuitive as it may seem, it might be more functional to do work in a child’s bedroom while they are not at home, or in a social space when people are going to be in another part of the house, or if you can stand to in your own bedroom, because it is the only private space left to you.
Della Hansmann
Although, in general, I am not a big believer in working in bedrooms, for those of us who had to do a little bit of that in the pandemic or are familiar with remembering that from our college dorm days, it does not lend itself to the best focus or the best sleep.
Della Hansmann
So when you’re thinking about how to fit home office space into your life, get a little bit creative and ask yourself, does it all need to be in one room? Are there different functions that can be distributed throughout the house? What are the needs of good work? Focus productivity for you. And then how can you find the space or spaces in your house that are going to make that happen?
Della Hansmann
Let’s wrap up with a great mid-century house feature of this week. And I, I told myself I was going to let these just pop up randomly and not necessarily be connected to the topic of the podcast. And then I can’t help choosing them with some sort of synchronicity with the topic. So for this home office episode, I want to talk about those little kitchen desks that you occasionally see.
Della Hansmann
And I’m kind of, I have a love hate relationship with these. On the one hand, I think they can be really charming, and they often have some there’s just such micro spaces, which I’m such a sucker for a micro space. I’m looking at an image from the mid mod madness round up that has this great little two tiered desk space with some sort of hidden cookbook storage.
Della Hansmann
And there’s actually, I think, a heater in the foot well area. So it would be a really cozy place to set up. And then, because there’s stairs behind it, there’s an interesting slashing diagonal in the storage shelf space above it, and then a fun wall clock. These, the kind of concept behind these are that there used to be more paperwork in household management, paper, calendar, paper recipe cards, paper bills, and you needed a spot to contain all of those things.
Della Hansmann
Today, the spot where we need to sort of capture drop zone stuff is often more at the entrance of the house, but it can still be helpful to use. If you have a vintage mid-century kitchen. You can use the little kitchen household office as the place that contains the mail as it comes in. Keys can be dropped there, not outerwear and shoes, but it can be a sort of capture items place.
Della Hansmann
Now this can also be a place that sort of has two identities. It can be a paperwork spot, and then when you’re doing like a big holiday cookie bake, it can be tucked away and become more flat surface. Often, the kitchen desk has the same sort of materials as the built in storage, and the same desk surface will be the same countertop material, as you see throughout the kitchen.
Della Hansmann
Stylistically, you might feel like it’s just not the best use of space, or you might find that you organically use. If you have a more modern kitchen layout, if you have an island or peninsula with some bar stools that you end up making a free standing kitchen office area anywhere you can sit down, your laptop, your tablet, some paperwork. But I do like the idea of it being cornered into one spot.
Della Hansmann
Frankly, even if you didn’t end up working at the kitchen desk, as it were, you might find that that’s the place where you put things away to and you spread them back out again on a countertop, on a peninsula, on an island work surface. But you don’t really want to leave worky things there.
Della Hansmann
You don’t really want to leave a tablet or an iPad, or a tablet or your computer or a pile of paperwork from work out on the counter that’s going to rapidly become a magnet for junk. So having a place to tuck that stuff out of sight, out of mind, or even just gather it together in a designated area can be really useful. I think, in the era of cell phones and laptops, we don’t really necessarily need to have a wall mounted calendar and a kitchen phone, but they can be really lovely.
Della Hansmann
So actually, I’m curious about your opinion here. What’s your take on the sort of kitchen home office, household office. Is it great? Or is it a relic, a dinosaur? Is it, I don’t know, honestly, sort of gendered and offensive. Do you have one? And do you use it? Do you love it? Do you hate it? I’m so curious.
Della Hansmann
So send me a message on Instagram and let me know what you think about yours, and if you would ever consider adding one in. They can also be a nice little homework station. They don’t necessarily have to be built into facing a wall, as they often were in a mid-century kitchen, because all of the workspaces in a mid-century kitchen if, in my opinion, if they had a fatal flaw, it’s that they tended to face the walls.
Della Hansmann
You could think about even just building in a certain amount of storage in a bar stool, pull up area at a peninsula or Island. You might put an adjacent drawer where you can tuck away charging cords, laptop, have a secret plug and household paperwork goes there, or work paperwork goes there.
Della Hansmann
This kind of ties back in with our home office topic in general, anywhere can be an office if it’s got the right seating, the right lighting, a little bit of flat surface and handy adjacent plugs, plus, if you plan for that, and you’ve got a place to put away what you’re using when you don’t use it, it can be more attractive and less Oh, there’s my work thoughts and my work responsibilities any time of the day or night. So that’s my little shout out to mid-century, kitchen, home, office stations.
Della Hansmann
And I’ll put some pictures of my favorite esthetically pleasing ones into the show notes and probably throw them onto Instagram today as well. Depending on your school and or work schedule, we might have just one more week before the holidays really kick in. So good luck to us all.
Della Hansmann
You can find everything about this episode, the show notes, the transcript and the pictures I mentioned at the show notes page, mid mod midwest.com/ 1910, next week, I’ll be back in your feed with a little roundup of philosophies around remodel budgeting. This may feel like a real pile on in terms of Christmas spending, but reality is always useful.
Della Hansmann
So I’m going to talk to you about how to think about doing very much for very little, or how to think about stretching out your budget, the most efficient ways to think about remodeling dollars and the best way to frame the idea of remodeling for next year and years to come.
Della Hansmann
Then I’m going to take a little bit of a break. So I will point you back towards some of my favorite episodes next week that you can go back and check out. There are well over 100 episodes of mid mod remodel at this point if you’ve already listened to them all, bless your heart and you might want to listen to them again.
Della Hansmann
Or if you have not yet checked out every episode, every season, every theme, I’ll point you to some of my favorites to listen to during the two weeks that we are off for holiday break. Meanwhile, send me your thoughts on home offices, and particularly the little office spaces that you find in mid-century kitchens, thumbs up or thumbs down. Have a great week.