25 Small Home Office Ideas That’ll Make You Feel Like a Boss

Talk about carving out your professional niche! This office alcove, expertly created by ELLE DECOR A-List designer Tiffany Howell for writer and director Mara Brock Akil, is its own mood, thanks to a dusty blue paint job, a vintage lamp, a floating desk, and an abstract artwork by Peter Beard.

Blink and you’ll miss this sexy study, in a Melbourne home designed by Powell & Glenn. A deep turquoise coat of paint and boudoir-like furnishings—including a Cassina chair and a Gubi mirror—make this area feel equally suited to gussying up as it is to bossing around.

Studies show that access to light and nature is a key ingredient to workplace productivity, so if you have the opportunity to place your desk near a window, take it. For this soothing setup in a Pebble Beach, California, home, the designers at Workshop/APD oriented a CB2 desk toward the stunning ocean view.

Just because your job is all work and no play doesn’t mean your home office needs to be too. Case in point: this fun-loving office in a Wisconsin lake house designed by Victoria Sass of Prospect Refuge Studio. The postmodern-inspired look includes a floating custom desk, a diminutive blue desk lamp from the Future Perfect, a primary-colored chair from Dims, and a playful rug from Cold Picnic. Next stop, happy hour!

Many of us don’t have the luxury of a dedicated room for a home office. If that’s the case, use art and accessories to delineate your work area in a way that complements the rest of your home decor. In the Brooklyn home of Calico Wallpaper founders Rachel and Nicholas Cope, a study nook in the living room gives off a distinctly midcentury vibe, with its Danish rosewood desk and a fun magazine rack by designer Arthur Umanoff. A mobile by Ladies & Gentlemen Studio and a painting by Leon Benn provide artful touches.

Like the Ed Ruscha artwork suggests, this Los Angeles home office is elegant without taking itself too seriously. Cliff Fong, the designer behind the ELLE DECOR A-List firm Matt Blacke, selected midcentury classics—like the 1967 desk by Peter Lovig Nielsen and the Arne Jacobsen chair behind it—but kept it all from looking too Mad Men with a glamorous vintage French chandelier and an all-white paint job. Home offices are a “Mighty Topic” indeed!

Like many home offices, this WFH area in a house designed by Timothy Godbold is in a bedroom. The vintage Danish teak desk, sculptural lamp, artworks, and chubby NOOM chair meld with the neutral decor of the room, ensuring that—though home offices are physical reminders of a 9-to-5—this look isn’t one to lose sleep over.

In this sweet study—in the French vacation home that ELLE DECOR A-List designer Jean-Louis Deniot shares with his sister—the out-of-office message is loud and clear, even though its residents may not be. A regal, blue-upholstered chair is pulled up to a pint-sized Peter Lovig Nielsen desk, while a rattan lamp (which ties in nicely with the whimsical rope details on the floor lamps and door trim) and sunny Slim Aarons photograph are reminders of the dreamy seaside setting.

If the thought of a corporate-looking WFH setup crushes your soul, then patterns are your new office bestie. Here, in a stately Rome home, art historian Carolina Vincenti eschewed a desk for a 19th-century table and an antique cane chair. Colorful textiles, like the Isabella Ducrot abstract polka-dot wallhanging and the floor-skimming curtains in a GP & J Baker fabric, add whimsy. And never forget: Flowers are a surefire way to brighten up the workday.

Your home office might not face a lush landscape, so why not create one yourself? Here, architect Carmel Greer installed a custom jungle wallpaper in her husband’s study, inspired by a Henri Rousseau painting, but you can always make do with an off-the-shelf scenic wallpaper or a fuss-free (and security deposit–saving) stick-and-peel option.

Small spaces can have a large visual impact, as ELLE DECOR A-List designer Ghislaine Viñas proves in her Bucks County, Pennsylvania, country house. As is the case for many hybrid workers, this home office space is in her bedroom. But a simple shelf, a high-impact chair (a 1960s scalloped design by Charles Hollis Jones), and sentimental accessories (like the artwork by her daughter, Saskia, above the desk) work overtime in this multipurpose arrangement.

We get it: desks are a reminder of all the work you still have to do. So why not camouflage it? We love this idea from ELLE DECOR A-List Titan Sheila Bridges—the front of this adorable antique secretary is matched to the robin’s-egg blue wall color. Antique landscape paintings hung above allow the mind to wander to nature…not that to-do list.

Nothing fosters creativity like a cozy, immersive environment—something designer Summer Thornton kept in mind in the design of this Chicago home. The study was painted in a lustrous blue-green (Benjamin Moore’s Jack Pine) and features chairs to match, all in service to the deep blue sprawl of Lake Michigan, visible through the window.

Hostess-with-the-mostest Rebecca Gardner wedged a home office into the corner of her pink living room, though you’d barely notice thanks to all of the maximalist accessories. The glass-topped table provides a chic perch for a laptop but also does double duty as a console table when guests arrive for cocktails.

If you have a creative profession, work and life are not mutually exclusive terms. And that’s what we love about the Los Angeles studio of artist Roy Dowell. Here, his works—which include the floor sculpture at left and two collages—enliven a humble sawhorse desk and chair.

An attractive Zoom backdrop is a must in this day and age, and nothing makes you look more erudite than a curated bookshelf. In their Rome apartment, architects Massimo Alvisi and Junko Kirimoto backed their custom shelf with a delicate floral wallpaper and displayed a series of sweet sculptures by Giuseppe Palermo atop the antique mantelpiece.

It’s no surprise that Nathalie Farman-Farma, founder of the fabric house Décors Barbares, surrounds herself with vibrant prints in her bohemian London home office. Here, she slid a Napoleon III stool beneath an antique Danish rolltop desk and topped it all off with a coordinating textile and an unruly zigzag cactus.

Want true work-life separation? Then hide your office. Here, in a Miami Beach apartment designed by Charlap Hyman & Herrero, the desk area virtually disappears thanks to a coat of slick emerald lacquer (Benjamin Moore’s Alligator Alley, for your information). “Using one color or material everywhere sublimates forms, blurring the edges of a room and the pieces of furniture within it,” explains firm co-founder Adam Charlap Hyman. “The effect is something expansive, even infinite.”

All-white rooms are classic, not to mention airy and calming. In this Palm Beach house, ELLE DECOR A-List Titan Victoria Hagan sought to run with that resort-like feel, so she worked within a limited palette of white, blue, and soft gray. But the small workspace in the guest bedroom got a kick thanks to bright red botanical prints and matching accessories. “It’s a very bright, fun room that really takes you away,” she says.

Home offices should feel grounding, not chaotic. And a good way to create calm is to surround yourself with objects that you know and love. In this cool-and-collected bohemian beach house, designer Schuyler Samperton designed a small living room work area around the client’s stunning 18th-century Chinese painter’s desk. Similarly soulful objects were layered into the vignette, such as the owner’s prized 1948 Greta Magnusson Grossman lamp and a 1930s French armchair. A terra-cotta-colored grass-cloth wallcovering, paisley curtains, and a patterned rug make the look extra embracing.