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How to set up the perfect home office: 6 Instagram profiles

Text by
Teresa Bellemo
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modern office at home

Smart working is becoming the norm, with new Instagram accounts springing up every day, proffering advice on how to design a corner of our own homes earmarked for calls, files and computers. The styles may all vary enormously but there’s only one rule: improvisation is the order of the day, it’s time to get organised

Updated on September 6th, 2023. So what if most Instagram posts are still focused on holidays, sea, dips, sunsets and cocktails with a palm tree in the background? We all know that the reality is quite different. We also know that these shares, apart from those from a small handful of people still on holiday, always on holiday or ambassadors for the Mediterranean sea, are all redolent of #tb, the hashtag that has survived since the early days of Instagram, even though hashtags have gone out of fashion. They have a throwback feel, a sense of looking back at ourselves, of nostalgia, of our lives just a week previously.

 

Now we’re back in the city, setting our alarms, resuming our old habits, calls and days marked by appointments and things that need to be done. It seems incredible, but all this has its own fascination. The adrenaline rush of the first day of school, even though the bells are a thing of the past, continues to be a trigger for organising and planning new objectives, good intentions and gym subscriptions for September onwards – and perhaps even restyling our own workspaces.

 

While smart working became the norm during the pandemic, even in what increasingly appears to be the post-Covid era, it seems to be one of the things (perhaps the only one) that might conform, if well organised, to the slogan that gained currency during the first lockdown: “we will emerge stronger.” Not going into the office every day, working from home and somehow managing to improve our work-life balance inevitably involves design. The most keenly-followed and most topical Instagram profiles and posts are largely devoted to these now-crucial corners of every home. Suggestions, mood boards, style ideas for desks at home that will make it possible to work from (almost) anywhere, in an organised fashion, unlike two years ago when we had to improvise, making calls from our kitchen tables next to the pizza dough.

Home_office_ features a collection of very different styles, all with elements in common – desks that channel both functionality and good looks are clearly a must, with the focus on the design of the constituent parts (chairs and tables first and foremost) as well as accessories such as plants and our chosen decorations.

The same goes for Inspiredhomeofficedesigns, featuring a more markedly American style, even in terms of the size of the spaces alone. This account focuses on home offices, spacious and ample enough for recreating actual dedicated spaces, in a bid to keep work and domestic rhythms even more separate, one of the most problematic issues around working from home.

 While shades of grey and essential lines predominate, Minimalsetups also shows that when setting up home offices, the motto “less is more” can be a winning one, and also that sometimes it takes very little, in terms of both space and must-haves to set up workstations that are perfect in terms of comfort as well as functionality, even with a single quote on the wall.

Smallhomeoffice and Homeofficeinteriordesign on the other hand take the opposite approach, although with differing characteristics. Short of space? No matter, it can still all be done, in terms of both design and options. The former channels an extravagant look: pastel colours, lush plants, wallpaper, small accessories and decorative elements that are extremely reminiscent of the most featured ideas on Pinterest. The latter is slightly less exuberant, certainly more Nordic, when it comes to colour choices, but equally full of detail and elements, along with some vintage touches, such as desks and chairs, whilst factoring in ergonomics (sitting down for eight hours a day has its own rules!).

Last of all, although smart working is the leading trend when it comes to social media accounts and the new working concepts, even dear old dusty offices need to be celebrated - modernised, even – precisely in order to meet the new demands for group working that have emerged after two years of atomised working.  Open spaces with their calls, telephone conversations and social distancing are also, inevitably, changing - sometimes featuring dedicated capsule workstations, as seen on Officesnapshots’ account.