Turn your office into a homely one
How each of us acclimatise to the space we work in is different. The sheer amount of time you interact with a workspace demands that you pay it some attention
Why do you need an office to write, my father asked recently. I do many things besides writing but honestly, he was right to be quizzical. As an independent consultant most of my work can be done off a laptop or phone, as efficiently from a coffee shop or a park bench. But I began this year with the intention of separating my work life from my home life, wanting to disengage the two so that there was discipline, routine and a sense of appreciation for coming home after work every day.
It’s been six years since I began working independently, which means the professional and personal have been enmeshed for a while, sometimes uncomfortably so. It was a blessing during covid and when my children were still at home but now that they are in boarding school, working from the house feels somewhat indolent. At the same time, workdays feel long and never-ending, infecting my sense of the personal. The aftertaste of a bad workday lingers, follows me to bed and then wakes up with me the next day.
Most of us spend more of our waking hours in an office space with our colleagues than we do at home. Before covid, the office felt like an essential part of the work life of a professional. Yet these spaces come with an emotional temporality. Unless it’s your own business, most of us don’t think of the spatial quality of the place we work in and sometimes we simply don’t have the option to exercise control over its physical features. As a person in the creative workforce, my space deeply impacts my output. When I first began working from home, I took my laptop around the house to see what area “spoke" to me, helped me think and write. And despite the fact that I’ve managed to complete a book and several other projects, I’ve missed having an office that wasn’t part of my home.
Also read: Understanding the emotional quotient of a home
The process of deciding what sort of space I want is always an interesting exercise in mining my past. I’ve been cycling through all the spaces I’ve ever worked in, going as far back as the first office environment I ever experienced, which was my father’s when I was, maybe, 10 years old. He was part of the oil and gas industry in the Gulf region during its heydays, from the 1970s till he sold his businesses in 2015. Back then, oilfield supplies companies in Dubai had large yards with storehouses for equipment and offices that were just air-conditioned Porta Cabins. On Fridays, the weekly holiday, my father would take me along if he had work to finish. I remember a large gypsum wood-panelled room lit by a white batten, with one window that looked out to the yard, a massive desk with little models of rigs and drill bits. I’d swivel around in his chair, pretend answer phone calls and steal some of the stationery. That room felt like it had been created purely on practical instincts, but there were photographs of people he worked with, awards he’d received, mementos from his travels, things that for a professional of that time looked professional.
When I got my first proper job, it was at the Hong Kong bureau of an American news magazine, where senior staff had offices for themselves. The one that left an impression belonged to the magazine’s art director; she always had the white ceiling lights off, using one floor lamp in its stead, and her room had the most interesting compilation of books and images. Years later, when I became the editor of a magazine and got my own office, I would also keep the ceiling lights off, choosing instead to work under just an Antonio Citterio desk lamp from Flos. Every entrant into my room would ask me how I could work in such a dark room.
I didn’t think it was dark at all. Intimacy is not a quality that we usually associate with a workspace but for me, the mood of that single light allowed me to feel comfortable and connected to a room where I often spent more than eight hours a day. If I hadn’t offset its signs of sterility and personalised it, I would have found it difficult to function.
How each of us acclimatise to the space we work in is different. I can’t tell you how you should do that for yours, but I can say that you ought to. The sheer amount of time you interact with a workspace, whether it takes the form of a desk or a cubicle, demands that you pay it some attention. Create the feeling you need to function in it with joy rather than just forbearance. Do it with light, with art, with objects, photos, a particular chair, even cushions—anything that indicates a certain investment in its environment. Of course, if you’re likely to be at a work space just a day or two a week and prefer that impermanence, then that’s that.
Twenty something years after I first began working, I consider it a privilege to be able to fashion an office for myself. In order to do it, I’ve appropriated spatial memories from many of the places I worked at. I’ve chosen to share the space with a friend who is an architect, laying the foundation for a creatively-aligned studio between us. To fashion this somewhat idealistic professional playground, we’re putting aside all notions of what a workspace is supposed to be like. We placed feeling at the top of our list of qualities to choose the site, even opting for something that feels cosy rather than professional or worse, commercial.
That is how we’ve ended up on the terrace floor of a ground plus two suburban house, shaded by a large virile almond tree. It is a rented space but we’re keeping aside its temporality to acknowledge the vast importance of the activity of work in our lives. I like perimeters and restrictions as a way to force practical decision making, especially when it comes to design. It forces innovation whereas a large pool of resources usually just allow for indulgent shopping trips. We’re thinking through every aspect of it, from materials to bathroom fittings, switch boards to paint colour, in order to create a space that will, I hope, have a quality of warmth that pulls us to it, somewhere that softens the sterility of online meetings and makes deadlines feel less daunting. The smell of coffee in the air, maybe some jazz on the turntable… A table at a coffee shop just wouldn’t be the same.
Also read: Create space for the warmth of shadows
Manju Sara Rajan is an editor, arts manager and author who divides her time between Kottayam and Bengaluru.
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