"Given the spatial constraint, it became immediately clear that we'd need to increase the available horizontal space by layering shelves vertically, which yielded more area than the entire room floor space while only taking up a third of it."
This must be the most convoluted way I have ever seen for simply saying "I've put up some shelves".
Oh, didn't think that'd make it to the front page, appreciated! OP and builder here.
The website was purely because a friend and I were looking for design work during lockdown and put together a couple of things we recently worked on, but basic design and build was a fun ~6 months solo project.
We had a good discussion on https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/1mlo6hu/tryin... over the weekend with more details, but also happy to answer any questions here.
Sick flight sim setup!
I basically never sim now because of how much of a hassle it is to get the whole thing setup. And then it just sits taking up space on the desk and I don't use the desktop for anything else for a while.
Thanks! And: Same. It got much better since the early days of MSFS 2020, and tried picking gear that has solid drivers/good scripting APIs, but I also rarely get it out just for fun, for the same reasons (except the occasional barrel rolls in a TBM over Manhattan cravings). It is great to have for a bunch of practice runs before actually heading to a new airport for the first time though.
This looks very charming, but how do you keep it dusted/clean practically?
Small room size helped a lot: Blueair HEPA filter with a (long, think Ostrich) feather duster for day to day, and ~ weekly wet wipe / vacuum.
Well done, this is inspiring. I've bookmarked and downloaded the PDF for future renovations myself.
Looking through other comments here, it's absolutely wild how a tech-oriented audience are happy to completely disregard traditional design (interior, graphic, UI, ...), while championing technology design (systems & databases).
What brand of keyboard (the music keyboard) do you have there? It's quite narrow isn't it?
Korg D1, indeed, good combination of solid full size keys in a slim package.
This is honestly one of the most appealing WFH spaces I've ever seen. MDF desk tops aside (I would've gone with cherry), I love this. I'm gonna need to steal the idea with the central switch board and look into industrial shelves...
It looks great, but, (no offense), that looks like the most uncomfortable home-office seating arrangement of all time. Your legs can't fit under the desk, and the low-back chair looks like it's for show, not sitting. I fear for your back!
None taken! Cut the shelving to my (elbows at 90 degrees) standing desk height and used it that way about 80% of the time, and for the rest the drafting height barstool like chair worked well, as the legs are naturally angled.
This is fantastic! Does this showcase mean that you’d be open to doing similar design/builds? I have a small space with similar requirements. Although about double the size of this…
Hi, where do you get your industrial shelving?
I have a workbench from GI. It’s built like a tank and looks good, with a Boos Brothers solid maple top. YMMV but when I told them a big part of it came bent in shipping, they DGAF. That was not a good experience.
site down because of us :D
That's a lot of words for "We put some industrial shelving in a closet with a keyboard and computer monitors, and we made it all beige."
I'm sorry this clearly isn't beige, this is the color of simple warm and transparent functionality of contemporary Korean and Japanese hospitality and retail spaces!
Haha this is the “Place, Japan ” meme
"The software you just built is a complicated version of what I could have built in Excel."
How else do you think designers can justify their inflated rates? Wrap it in in a fancy word salad to elevate it and sell it to wealthy urbanites.
Reminds me of that scene[1] from the Silicon Valley TV show where that designer was tasked to design a server box and he started the meeting showing random pictures to the CEO with some bongo drum soundtrack in order to "establish a common vocabulary" lol, or the brand manual of the infamous Pepsi logo redesign fail[2] full of made up geometrical nature BS stories that the agency pulled out of their ass to milk Pepsi, which I'm sure is what the satire form Silicon Valley was based on.
At this point, I think designers just operate on the basis of "a fool an his money are easily parted".
[1] https://youtu.be/qyLv1dQasaY?si=yUwQU-9EQL3QMxbi&t=6
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/hspqgd/pepsi_logo_r...
It's not foolish. Design is subjective and it's most often a question with no objectively good answer, so it's between the designer and whoever appraises his output. There's no secret design paradigm that makes everyone happy.
>It's not foolish.
It is all about fooling the viewer. Like for example seeing some run down old buildings in US or Eastern Europe will make people scoff, but if you show them similar looking run down buildings in South Mediterranean Europe or Japan they will be in awe. It's about perception.
>Design is subjective
No it isn't. Just like art and people's appearances, there's unanimously objective on what's beautiful and what's ugly.
The redesigned Pepsi logo is objectively worse, which is why it was so short lived and reverted back to the original design.
People who say there's no such thing as ugly design because it's al subjective are coping hard or trying to sell their design agency.
> Just like art and people's appearances, there's unanimously objective on what's beautiful and what's ugly.
Neither of those things is true. Plenty of artistic movements have been both praised and derided, and many people have a "type" which influences who they do (or don't) find attractive.
As to idea that there's a universally agreed-upon definition of objectively pleasing design, I suggest you take a look at the work of the Memphis Group.
Which redesigned Pepsi logo are you referring to here? The one with the legendary design document[0] lasted from 2008 to 2023.
[0] https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
... can you share with us a design for a beauty meter which objectively measures beauty? Since it's not a subjective characteristic, it should be possible to establish whether something is beautiful without a subject to perceive and experience it.
This is such a childish and cynical take. Just because you fail to see something, doesn't mean it's not there.
It's cool but also kinda wild to hire a design firm to figure out the layout of your home office. Personally my home office is very "personal" and one of the things I enjoyed the most is figuring out where everything should go.
To me this is the same as hiring a development firm to build you a set of dotfiles.
If this was a write-up about someone’s personal WFH office setup, it would be pretty cool. Written as a case by a design firm it seems very underwhelming. It just looks like a tiny room crammed with equipment. Wouldn’t you at least go for custom-made shelving to use every last millimeter of the room as well as possible?
If you read the writeup you'll see that it was part aesthetic choice and price consideration.
The client is the "design firm". The website is for their own firm and they used their own office in their portfolio.
This person is probably overemployed and making $1M
What makes you think that?
The fact that there's a blog post by a design studio on how they shoved a bunch of shelves, acoustic padding, sixty computer monitors and a flight sim controller into a utility cupboard.
The contrast between all that fancy equipment and the actual work surface being a cheap-as-can-be fibreboard (that will get nasty quickly and suck up all liquids) with a more or less unfinished edge that will probably feel uncomfortable is a bit too much of the designerly touch for me...
Man, I got carpal tunnel syndrome just from looking at the edge of that fibreboard. I couldn't work at that "desk" for 20 minutes.
Like mentioned in other comments standing desk height, concerned about it initially as well, but gave it a try and quite happy with the surface (it compresses easily and bit of treatment prevents it from getting gross in 3 months).
There is no contrast lol, if you actually consider the other gear choices he made they are all equally terrible. The god awfully un-ergo chair, poor measuring LS50's, junk keyboard......
Nice to see what people put together... I'm hoping to do some custom desk builds etc in the next year or so myself.
My biggest change for my home setup has been moving away from a KVM with work and personal computers on a single desk to multiple desks where I'm physically moved. I prefer to have my feet on the ground, so don't like the drafting chair or barstool foot rests. I've also moved to 45" (U)WQHD displays (3440x1440) for my work spots. I have two Xeneon Flex and another display of the same size that's by LG.
It's kind of like 2x large 3:4 aspect displays glued together mostly pinning apps to half the screen on one side or the other. My vision is pretty bad, so having the larger pixels helps a lot for my visibility and being able to function. It's also worth noting that I didn't pay full retail for any of the screens. The Xeneon goes on sale for about half price every couple months on Corsair's site, and I picked up the LG as a return from BestBuy for about $550, which was a pretty good deal for what it is.
I also tend to prefer physical switch keyboards, currently backlit Das keyboards with Cherry-MX Brown switches. My mouse is a Logitech with a weighted scroll wheel. I do like the Unicomp keyboards more, but they're a bit more noisy so I settle with the browns.
Love the term multimodal WFH.
Like you I have diverse, equipment-laden hobbies: guitar/piano/dj/drums/photography and work from home.
It's really hard to feel like you can quickly get to all of those activities, without reconfiguring -anything- and creating spaces tuned to all those things.
Love that this approach is easy to change w/ the industrial wall shelving.
Also appreciate touching on some of the specialized equipment that tends to come into play.
That was one of the weirdest effects of the space - it almost felt like transitioning from affairs to a marriage, in a good way.
Before that, I often used to work out of random / public places, and I when I got really stuck just change scenery. Being able to switch modes built that weird sense of home, knowing that when I get stuck, I can switch modes for a bit and do / work on something else, and no matter what the space would be there for me. Hard to describe without sounding too prosaic, but really glad to have built it.
Here is my COVID bathroom office: https://x.com/perryfromsoma/status/1351396588615204872
I love your setup. The ingenuity of such solution is outstanding. I have so many questions but I'm afraid to ask.
Why is the chair under the desk facing the wrong way?
I love small space office builds! I also have a tiny den. I would love to see more inspiration of how people use that kind of space, especially if it's (sadly) windowless, which I think makes it pretty hard
A little OT: It seems that so few studio monitors (speakers) have grilles. I have kids and I don't want to need to trust them, or to need to ban them. I believe Genelec have grilles but the price is a little high for me for the models with decent-sized drivers. Given that Genelec are so popular, I can't imagine presence-of-grille presents a fundamental compromise, sound-wise.
KRK seem to have grilles on theirs, but I want something with a flatter sound.
Any HN'ers out there got any tips?
The KEF come with cloth covers, but they're too elastic to deter a determined toddler. The smaller Genelec like the 8040's are quite protected and show up on somewhat trusted second hand sites like reverb.com for about ~$500-800 pair every now and then, which is hard to beat given the built in amps.
Used 8040s is a good call. Nice price point (bit higher in UK though I think).
This looks cool, but I really don't understand the constraints here. You have high tens of thousands of dollars of gear, but can't afford a space larger than a closet for it? Where did the space constraint come from? Was it just to see if you could do it?
I'm just a bit perplexed as to how this particular combination of things came together.
I hate to be a quote-TFA-and-say-nothing-else guy but:
> Location: Brooklyn, NY
Yes, and?
Guessing doubling the area of that room would cost upwards of half a million, not tens of thousands.
They clearly stated "and nothing else". ;)
Very cool, any maybe some people are better at managing clutter, but I would make a huge mess of this space in days.
The EE lab would put it over the top for me.
I'm glad they put the two pieces of Blackmagic gear in the $135 rack mount shelf, just to set it on top of the desk in the end.
Used to be in the rack (bottom left) initially, but fiddling with it down there eventually got too annoying.
Reminds me of the Nomadic Furniture book "cubicles". Here's an instructable showing something inspired by it.
https://www.instructables.com/The-Perfect-Instructable-build...
But where's the giant box of wires go?
If you swear at them long enough they start disappearing...
Mostly bottom of back shelves and behind vertical shelf beams.
Musical equipment in view of the camera, so that checks at least one requirement.
My rule of camera positioning is that I've got to have a load of my books as a backdrop.
Maybe it's just me but this looks like a nightmare to get any work done. Way too cluttered and uncomfortable looking. That "Desk" if it can be called that just looks like someone nipped down to their local DIY shop and picked up some budget garage storage, slapped a bit of rough cut wood on it and called it a day.
Its interesting how many of the comments here are criticizing the cost, the decision to commission a design firm, or that it just wouldn't work for them. In which case, great! You can choose however you want to do your home office. This person put in effort to both deliberately design their home office and to share it with everyone. That's pretty amazing! And even if I might not go the same way, there are def some very cool ideas from this that I will certainly look into : )
Agreed. Too much negativity in the thread. I love seeing other people's offices, and having a blog that talks through the design decisions is great.
I've very different aesthetics and gear, but took ideas from this for sure. Loved the conferencing setup, for example.
Appreciated!
The space looks nice but that seats looks very uncomfortable.
How do you call these plug into holes every inch frames used for this? I could use something like this for related projects.
There really is no precise name for these.
Source: A technology hoarder who has too many shelves like this full of junk.
Edit: I stand corrected by @bobson381
I have several of these under the Gorilla Rack brand name and they're sold as Industrial Shelving Units. Home Depot in the US also sells these under the Muscle Rack and Edsal brands. These shelves are good, but I caution against using them in rooms with uneven floors (i.e., basement floors) because the feet are not adjustable. The particle board shelf surfaces can also deteriorate easily in moist environments. OP's shelf is one coffee spill away from a ruined shelf. That particle board is also made with formaldehyde and water damage will release it, FYI.
I have even more Wire Rack Shelves from various brands, all mostly with interchangable parts. A major brand is Nexel. There's also a lot of good parts available through the Metro brand sold by The Container Store. I appreciate the Wire Rack Shelving for it's modularity, adjustable feet, and also the ability to use caster wheels. You can always cut your own solid shelf surface from whatever material you like. The drawback is these Wire Rack Shelves cost twice as much as the Industrial Shelving Units.
Why not some finished birch plywood for surfaces you work on? I get worried about my wrists just looking at that particle board.
The desk I'm typing this on is a 2x4' sheet of birch plywood screwed to a TV cart (it's the perfect height for my Steelcase chair). The edges are just as unfinished as that particle board, but haven't caused me any problems in 4 years of use.
Thanks. Good pointers.
I do have a whole rack in a garage kind of like it, but I was hoping I could get something nicer and painted like in the article, ideally with different length elements, so I could make custom furniture from them, and then just cut MDF boards to size or something.
Good luck on your project! Btw, a lot of these racks come with plastic feet. You could cut shorter lengths from the bottom using an angle grinder or saw rated for metal, then hide the rough ends with the feet.
Actually, I don't know if those are really plastic feet, or if they're just added to prevent metal from poking holes in the cardboard box during shipping.
FWIW I used similar IKEA units.
Cheap and flexible, although the way they work is different (uprights have holes drilled every 2cm or so for their entire length, and you insert metal dowels at the height you need and the shelves clip into that.
What sold it for me was that the IKEA ones are made of wood, so it makes it trivially easy to modify - cut a bit out here, screw something in there etc. This made it ideal for my shed workshop build where I needed some customisations for awkward tools and I could put a workbench exactly where I want it just by screwing it in. Finally just screw the uprights together and into the wooden walls of the shed and you have a rock-solid custom-built racking system that can be reconfigured and modified easily.
Teardrop shelving! For the shape of the holes.
Also look into "SuperStrut" https://www.google.com/search?q=superstrut
I'm guessing you mean the support structure for the desk and shelves, which seems to be a nicer version of something like
https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/H-4814/Wide-Span-Storag...
or perhaps the same thing ( in several sizes ) with a coat of gloss paint
Most common term in the US is something like Boltless Shelving, specific shelves used here were https://www.globalindustrial.com/c/storage/shelving/boltless...
Next is - have it all in camper, solar, satellite and all.
This looks absolutely amazing, but since this is the Internet and people need to complain about stuff, I can't see the knit cloth mat working well with a wheeled chair!
Haha, very good (and true) observation - but turns out if you practice 6+ months, you develop a knack for pushing chairs over uneven terrain.
I can already feel the unfinished edge of the desk chipboard on my wrists. Such a premium finish!
Something interesting with the pictures the grading maybe, they seem matte how I'd describe it amateurly, it looks good
Thanks! Had a really good camera & lenses for the day (Hasselblad X1D II with Zeiss Otus and Canon TS-E 17mm), and then post was mostly reducing colors besides brown/green/red hues a bit.
speakers should ideally look down the long way of the room...
Well, I see we have very similar hobbies and careers! Nice setup.
> "Work from home is here to stay"
Sadly, this is not true for most of us. :-(
While there has been a step down from the pandemic max, we are still at higher levels of WFH than ever before: https://theconversation.com/us-workers-with-remote-friendly-...
What a peaceful setup. Which monitors are those?
Eizo CS2740, really happy with them. Weird anecdote: they weren't available in the US at the time yet, so I got them off amazon.co.jp, and it was the most impressive thoughtful multi-layer cardboard packaging I ever got from any reseller. Probably my disdain for Amazon worker treatment and appreciation for Japanese care no matter what, all standing there in one impressive confusing package.
Very underwhelming keyboard there, given the overall effort.
That Das Keyboard is the only piece in the entire website I didn't quite dislike. But I'm biased as I'm typing this on one (although a Tenkeyless one - it's ridiculous to have a numpad, it's not the 80s).
The rest goes from "meh" to "gross" (that fibreboard is getting _nasty_ even with a bit of sweat over a few months, not to mention its raw edge is going to result in blood loss sooner or later)
The rest isn't particularly nice either but I would describe it more as "suboptimal decisions" than lack of effort.
They're not bad keyboards but you can get superior custom tenkeyless or even fullsize ones (if you must) without even having to deal with group buys now.
> superior custom tenkeyless
How are tenkeyless keyboards "superior"? Missing keys are a feature now?
I think the parent poster didn't imply that TKL keyboads are intrinsically superior (on the other hand, unless your task is in the 1% benefiting from a keypad.... they kind of are IMHO, at least they're more portable and don't waste space on a desk), but rather described 2 possible attributes of better keyboards, not necessarily related.
On laptops, usually a keypad is an automatic indicator of a terrible product meant for the less knowledgeable audience. The keypad causes the rest of the keyboard to be squished to the left, with the hands now shifted off center and closer than normal. Awful experience every time.
> don't waste space on a desk
That has always baffled me. If you're using a computer professionally you have at least two monitors... and even one is as wide as a full sized keyboard or wider.
Not to mention that TKLs tend to also squeeze the arrow keys and the other navigation keys.
You're probably thinking of a 75%, which is a questionable layout, yes. A typical TKL keyboard is spaced like a fullsize, just without the numpad cluster.
Smaller layouts (even 40%) have their advantages in minimizing how much you have to move your hands and fingers but there are tradeoffs (and a learning curve due to the necessary layers in the smallest ones).
The rest of the desk is for things and papers being worked on. Or more realistically, piles of "do this real soon".
But to me the real point of a TKL (87%) is to avoid having a dead space between your right typing hand and the rodent. If I were the type of person who wanted a numpad, I'd get a separate one and either put it to the right of the rodent, or to the left of the main keyboard.
But what I really want is more macro/F-keys. I use them to switch between desktops/windows, and 12 is just not enough. But I don't know if I've even seen a modern keyboard with even one extra row, never mind just stacking several more rows up top.
I'm finally going to try doing something about this. I've got a few of those cheap 4x6 keypads coming, as well as a 75% ortholinear (which is really just a fancy name for a 5x15 keypad, at least the one I'm getting with all 1u keys). I'm thinking the 4x6 keypads up top, and then maybe the 75% turned 90 degrees to the lefthand side of the main keyboard, for one continuous macropad surface? We'll see.
(FWIW I don't rely on the "home row" to touch type, so YMMV)
> is to not put a dead space between your right typing hand and the rodent
I suppose it depends on what the work is and your style. I tend to drive my IDEs from the keyboard. That of course means I want my PgUp PgDown Home End full size and not cramped.
The mouse is for circle strafing and then my right hand stays on the rodent.
TenKeyLess / 87% refers to keyboards missing the numpad, but otherwise full size. For example, I'm typing this from a Coolmaster Novatouch. The gap between Backspace/Insert and F12/PrintScr might be a little narrower on this particular model? But otherwise it's a standard size keyboard, just missing the numpad. And If anything, the lack of the numpad makes PgUp PgDown even easier to register to, as they're right at the edge.
Was concerned about splinters too, but if you compress and treat/seal it a bit, it works quite well, although they do get a bit gross after 2-3 years to the point where you should flip/replace them.
(2020) ?
It appears in the capture in 2022 of the main page https://web.archive.org/web/20220215164019/https://sdo.group... but perhaps they posted it before that.
Those are some dusty remotes.
It took my about 3 days to get over it after seeing it on the final images.
I was looking for the multimodal LLM homelab…got really confused for a second
I wonder—style is subjective and I think it looks nice. The floors are pretty and the rug looks comfy. Beige walls are, eh, well, safe pick I guess.
Preference disagreement: I absolutely need my workspace to be different from my gaming space, or I’d go totally nuts.
But, there’s an objectively correct answer for the placement of the camera, subject, monitors, and window, to avoid glare and getting washed out. Does anyone know if they did it right?
Took a bit of shuffling around, biggest challenge was getting a somewhat decent frame given the incredibly small space - main camera facing the window had simple Sigma MFT lens that worked in the end, with a hood on to make sure the ring light doesn't diffuse into it.
> Preference disagreement: I absolutely need my workspace to be different from my gaming space, or I’d go totally nuts
Preach. I made this wonderful office for myself. It's got name brand monitor stands, I only need one cable, the desk mat is cute, and there's a huge pegboard for all my work hardware.
After a month or so, I preferred working on the kitchen table with a laptop. Brains are funny things.
At first I couldn't put my finger on why this website layout was beautiful but I was struggling on my 13" macbook: The two column text are too spaced apart, and really should be one column or closer together for readability.
Is it the line length that's tedious, or the columnar layout itself confusing?
I think a little bit of both? I think UX wise I'm not expecting two columns on a website in between these "photo spreads".
Just your average design studio's website
comfy
I wouldn't be able to work in such a space for long. It kind of "squeezes the brain" if I can paint such picture what it feels. Like walls are pushing your head in and you can't think and focus.
Unfortunately such situation, in countries where space is at massive premium, leads to wasted human potential. People would love to have hobbies, experiment but simple lack of space very much prevent that.
So if your parents are not rich or you yourself don't have a job that could let you rent a workshop or studio, then it is extremely frustrating and leads to depression. I know someone who got to the point of suicide, because he couldn't find any way to get space to pursue his interests. He felt like an absolute failure and that the world didn't want him to exist.
Hmm. My home office is about the same length but double the width (room is like 10 sq meters). It only has computers and not music gear/flight sim controllers though, so less cluttered. And a proper ergonomic chair :)
But now that I think of it, most of the time I spend in there I'm sitting at my chair and looking at the monitors. I never look back. So I'm basically using the same space as this office.
Maybe subconsciously knowing i have some space behind me before I hit the wall helps...
Hard to respond with something help - and/or meaningful, but still: my whole adult life oscillated (OK, oscillates) between being in the most incredible spaces and really shit situations, like being dependent on friends to crash on their sofas, live in literal garages, rebuild abandoned SROs etc for months while friends I grew up with had homes, kids, families etc. I just got lucky to be delusional / screwed up enough in just the right ways to keep going.
It's really hard to overcome that feeling once it's there, but you somehow have to find that space in yourself and through others. Some of the most talented and skilled people I know live in the weirdest places, but somehow managed to find their place. If you're lucky to live in a big city, check out spaces like Noisebridge or Resistor, or whatever your local equivalent is.
If that's not an option, maybe the internet can help. Don't know if for example engineering is your thing, but the reason I respect folks like IMSAI Guy or bigclivedotcom on Youtube so much isn't just that they really know what they're talking about, they also seem like really decent people and found their place. They don't seem to be particularly rich or fancy, and I'm sure they have their own stuff to deal with in their lives, but they kept going until they found their place. Long rant, hope it helps somehow/somewhat.
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Farting in here >>>