Built for Tuesday

WFH and No Spare Room? Here's Your Guide to Designing Rooms That Adapt.

It's Wednesday, 11:14 a.m. Your laptop is on the dining table. The printer is in the front hall. Three contracts sit on the bookshelf next to a vase. The Zoom is happening here because the dining room has better light. Your office, technically, is the entire ground floor.

This is not, strictly speaking, a real estate problem. It's a design problem, and one of the more fixable kinds.

Most homes are built for living, not working. The office has had to come home, and not every home has a spare room to give it. The fix is not converting the garage. It's rooms that adapt. The real difference between a room that works and one that doesn't is purposely building for known activities. Think community centre multi-purpose: it's a blank slate for multiple activities, but there is no warmth to it. An adaptable room is built on purpose around the specific functions that actually happen in your life.

The way to know which functions to build for is to ask what repeats. If you work in the room every Tuesday and host overnight guests twice a year, the priority is the desk, not the Murphy bed. Pick what genuinely happens, build for those, and the rare uses find another corner.

Three principles

In practice, an adaptable room comes down to three things.

1. Modular. Furniture that shape-shifts. Instead of one enormous fixed sofa, a sectional that comes in pieces. A Murphy bed that goes up and comes down. A flip-down desk built into the millwork. If the room needs to do two things, the furniture needs to be willing to move. Resource Furniture is one of our favourites.

2. Layered lighting. Overhead light is for finding the cat, not for living. A room that changes function over the course of a day needs floor lamps and table lamps you can switch in and out as the mode shifts. Nobody wants to wind down under the same fixture they answered emails under. We work with lighting consultants, like our friends at Above 90 and THINK L  to ensure that our designed spaces include lighting for different moods.

3. Storage that closes. Hide things. Put them away. Behind doors, in drawers, inside a closet. The thing that ends a workday is being able to put it away in under sixty seconds.

THREE FROM THE STUDIO

An office that doubles as a maker's space, with long layout surfaces for ongoing projects and a window seat whose drawers open for file storage (and which makes a fine spot to sit and read). A portable magnet light moves with the work, so the lighting follows the function instead of the other way around.

A home office planned for a shared room: two working adults, to teenagers doing homework. The desk is one long surface, with an open shelf above and a strip light beneath the shelf, doing duty as task lighting. A tower at each end holds the printer and the storage for everything work- or school-related. The rest of the room is flex space: beanbag chairs, a TV, and room for the teenagers to actually be teenagers.

A WFH space planned into the guestroom. A bed for the guests who come twice a year, a built-in desk for the work that happens every weekday. Both functions fully accommodated, neither one apologizing for the other.

A home that adapts stays livable as your life changes. When the contract becomes full-time. When the side project becomes the main thing. When the room that was occasional becomes the room you can't imagine working without. It is a home that knows what it's for, and is ready when that changes.