Make your office cheery, neat and welcoming with these space-saving, decluttering tips
More: Tour the rest of Laura Jo's unplugged home
Our favorite part of a home workspace is the cubicle-free environment with opportunity for window views and ample natural light. In the home office of Laura Jo Wegman, Coyuchi’s design director, colored pencils, fabric swatches, and hand-drawn sketches adorn a cord-free desktop. The desk faces the window and views of a palm tree-lined street in San Francisco.
The best way to save space and avoid clutter in your home office is to have less physical items to store and organize. Digitize files, bills, all paperwork. Use services like Dropbox to save, and organize your digital storage. Bonus: With all your business files digital, you can set up your office from any surface—the dinning table, the kitchen island, or your beach-front hotel room in Hawaii.
More: See the rest of this Echo Park live-work space
Keep your work project inspiration at arm’s length, and in plain view. In the home office of designers Benjamin Luddy and Makoto Mizutani the desktop (solid-core doors atop plywood storage shelf units) resides below a full-wall swatch board made of corklike Homasote.
Not ready to commit to office art (and nails in the walls)? No problem. Temporarily affix light-weight art, family photos, or inspiring images to a wall with colorful rice paper tape.
It's common to fill desktop space with stacks of books, files, and magazines. Keep your desktop clear of clutter by having above-desktop shelving. This keeps your belongings contained, but in view, and within arm's reach.
If your office is in plain sight (perhaps it's a corner of the living room), work objects like literature into the aesthetic. Take the sleeves off hardcover books and arrange the spines by color. If your storage system is also in view, help blend it into the room by choosing storage boxes that are similar to the wall paint, like these white magazine files.
Need a lot of storage, but nowhere to hide? Avoid visual clutter by unifying storage boxes. Choose a monochromatic organizational system and group similar items together, like the shelves of tan file boxes pictured here.
Once your space and the contents of your office are organized, help promote that zen feeling internally by adding greenery to your workspace. Fresh air (open that window!) helps too. Check out our favorite houseplants and tips for helping them thrive: www.sunset.com/garden/flowers-plants/indoor-plants.
A clean and tidy workspace encourages productivity. At the end of a work session, put everything in its place (books shelved, files stored; do your best to avoid starting a junk drawer), and put computers and devices in sleep-mode or powered off. Bonus: A clean work space means you can leave the door open to your beautiful office when guests visit.
Even the smallest homes have room for an office space. Alek Lisefski's Sebastopol, California, home is only 240 square feet (tiny-project.com), and a nook by the front door houses a small workstation. Like this space, any room in your home can be multi-purpose.