WFH in a Flat: How to Build a Home Office Into Your Space Without Giving Up a Bedroom

Home offices are usually an afterthought that homeowners put together once they enter a WFH arrangement. This results in work setups shoehorned into areas meant for lounging and relaxation.

Documents strewn across the dining area and the communal noise bleeding into Zoom meetings are all too common. They’ve become the charms and nuances of WFH professionals. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Intentional HDB interior design in Singapore helps create these two distinct spaces, maintaining the zen of each function.

You can have a dedicated workspace annexed away from the relaxed atmosphere of your home. This setup provides you with the benefits of working from home, minus the distractions associated with it.

Key Takeaways

• Intentional interior design prevents work-life blur by creating distinct zones for productivity within a room or flat.
• Acoustic panels or bookshelves can effectively block distractions without the need for permanent walls.
• Investing in a high-quality ergonomic chair and adjustable desk is essential for preventing physical strain during eight-hour shifts.
• Visual cues, such as cool lighting and indoor plants, set the home office’s atmosphere apart from the broader room’s.
• A well-designed home office should be treated as a core part of a home’s layout rather than a makeshift afterthought.

Common Challenges of Working From Home

While the lack of a commute is a significant perk of the WFH setup, your space can pose challenges that lead to burnout and affect your productivity. These challenges include:

• The Blur Between Professional and Personal Life. When your living room is also your boardroom, it becomes increasingly difficult to switch off and wind down. This lack of separation can turn your home—once a place of refuge—into a source of constant work-related stress.
• The Distraction Factor. When you work in a shared living space, you are at the mercy of your environment. Whether it’s the sound of another family member having their own Zoom meeting, or perhaps your younger brother is having guests over. This can make it difficult to focus and think.
• Clutter and Spatial Encroachment. Without a designated work area, equipment such as monitors, cables, documents, and laptops tends to clutter the home. Take, for example, a dining table littered with documents.
• Poor Ergonomics. In a residential flat, many resort to working from the dining table, the sofa, or even the bed. While these spots work for an hour or two, they are not designed for eight-hour shifts. Poor posture and inadequate lumbar support can arise from this habit. Furthermore, lighting in residential spaces is often designed for relaxation (warm and dim) rather than the cool daylight tone lights you’ll see in corporate offices.

Intentional HDB interior design can create a zone within your residential space that provides the focus you need to get your work done.

This allows you to have a designated space for your work, away from the noise and distractions. It’s a spot with optimal ergonomics and layout to help you get through your weekday tasks.

What Does a Home Office Need?

A workspace isn’t just any surface where you can place your laptop. To stay productive and maintain the boundaries between your professional and relaxation zones, your setup needs a few non-negotiables:

Privacy

In a shared flat or a busy household, privacy is often the hardest element to secure.

You’ll need to create something we in the interior design trade like to call “psychological privacy.” This can be achieved through acoustic management, such as sound-absorbing room dividers.

This ensures that sound from outside your zone—such as someone vacuuming the living room—doesn’t bleed into your space. Also, so that your Zoom meetings don’t distract the other occupants within the space.

You don’t have to put up new walls around your work zone just to get privacy. You can achieve privacy through the following:

• PET Felt or Foam Panels: Lightweight, hexagonal or rectangular tiles that can be arranged as a geometric wall feature.
• Acoustic Slatted Wood Wall: Stylish timber vertical slats with a felt backing
• Bookshelves: A bookshelf filled with books of varying heights and depths diffuses sound into many smaller, weaker waves.

Computer Desk

The desk is the anchor of your office. This is where you’ll place your laptop or PC, your monitors, your keyboard, and all the accessories you’ll need to get work done.

Your desk is essentially your work zone, much like your work area back in the physical office.

It’s worth noting that your desk shouldn’t just be a place to put your things. Ideally, it should be at an ergonomic height, so that your arms are at a relaxed height while you’re typing, and your neck isn’t bent to the point of aching.

Remember, you’ll likely spend a lot of time at your computer desk. So, make sure it’s custom-made to ergonomically accommodate your anatomy, or is adjustable so you can set it at any height you wish.

It might also be worth getting a desk with a drawer for your paperwork and other work documents. 

Ample Storage for Documents and Paperwork

Nothing ruins the homey atmosphere of a flat faster than stacks of loose paper and tangled charging cables. Whenever you see them, even as you’re sitting at a reclining lounge chair in front of a TV, you’ll be reminded of the report you have to complete. Ruins the Friday, doesn’t it?

To keep your workspace from encroaching on your living space, you need a dedicated storage solution.

You could get a desk with a drawer or a cabinet to store all your work documents. A home office’s storage solution keeps your space neat and tidy, but more importantly, it prevents work clutter from invading the sanctity of your work-life balance.

Ergonomic Seating

If you’re going to splurge on one item, make it the chair.

While a stylish dining chair might look better in your living room, it’s rarely built for an eight-hour shift. A proper ergonomic chair provides adjustable lumbar support, armrests, and  headrest.

Investing in your physical health prevents the mid-afternoon slump and ensures your work doesn’t lead to long-term back issues.

It’s worth noting, however, that ergonomic chairs aren’t the most interior-design-friendly pieces of furniture. They don’t offer much design flexibility, since they’re built with ergonomics in mind. This is a good thing, since their shapes and forms zone your work area as an office space—away from the homey feel of the rest of your spaces.

Do You Need an Entire Room for a Home Office?

Ideally, yes. But the impracticality of renovation would deter anyone from pursuing it.

Same reason why some people need walk-in closets—so that they have an entire room just for trying on clothes. Having an entire room dedicated to a home office creates a zen atmosphere for getting work done.

However, the cost, the timeline, and having to deal with the occupied renovation might not be worth the drawbacks of simply working in your dining area.

It’s still possible to have the distraction-free benefits of a closed-door office space within your existing layout, without putting up a wall.

Tips for Integrating a Home Office Into Your Space

When you don’t have a spare room to dedicate to a home office, you’ll require a bit of spatial gymnastics and creativity with how to go about it.

With the right design strategy, you can create a harmonious zone that provides privacy, ergonomics, and the psychological environment needed for productive work.

Some tips for integrating your home office into your existing space without a massive renovation include:

Use a Temporary Partition

If you don’t have a structural nook, you can make one using non-fixed boundaries. This physical boundary sections your office space off from the rest of the room. In addition, it prevents people from walking into view during Zoom calls and can help diffuse any sound from the room.

Some things that can be used as temporary partitions include:

A classic three-panel screen is a low-effort way to block your office from the rest of the room, and prevents your desk from cluttering the room’s intended interior design.

A backless bookshelf can also act as a room divider—providing a backdrop for your Zoom meetings while maintaining your space’s acoustics.

Use Stylistic Zoning

You don’t always need a physical wall to define a space; sometimes, a visual shift is enough to signal your office’s zone. This is known as stylistic zoning.

In a typical WFH setup, the following items create the stylistic shift separating your home office from your bed space.

• Office Chair: Ergonomic office swivel chairs bring a corporate flair to them, stylistically zoning your computer space from the broader room your home office is situated in—whether that’s your bedroom or the living room
• Indoor Plants: Plenty of Instagram and Pinterest curation features indoor plants in home offices. They’re cohesive design elements that blend well with any design, yet are distinct enough to zone off your home office from the broader room.
• Targeted Lighting: Use a dedicated task lamp with a cooler colour temperature (4000K to 5000K) for work, while keeping the rest of the room in warm, ambient light. Through the use of distinct lighting, your office separates itself from your bed space.

In addition to dictating your work zone, it also helps with the psychological shift needed between work and relaxation.

Integrate the Home Office Into Your Bedroom

Integrating a home office into your bedroom is one of the most ergonomic ways to get to work. Upon waking up, you can immediately get to work, leaving brushing your teeth and breakfast for later.

These things happen, especially in the life of a work-from-home professional.

However, you wouldn’t want to clutter your most quiet and personal sanctuary with your office mess. Some tips for effectively integrating your home office with your bedroom without breaking this barrier include:

If you have a walk-in closet with extra space, placing a desk inside your walk-in closet effectively turns it into a dedicated physical workspace.

If you don’t have a walk-in closet, place your work desk on the opposite end of your bed. That way, there’s a spatial boundary between your work and your relaxation space. Your bed won’t make for the best Zoom backdrop, however, so make sure to use a virtual background.

Also, invest in carpets and rugs. You can place your bed on a carpeted floor to section off your relaxation space.

Why the Home Office Shouldn’t Be An Afterthought

Before the pandemic, taking our work home was rare. We left our work at the office, so home offices weren’t standard implementations.

Normally, when we’d be working from home, we’d just make a home office out of what was there. In this case, it was almost always the dining room. Some resorted to their bedrooms and living rooms, inevitably blurring their work-life barriers.

However, as the world becomes more digital and connected, a home office becomes increasingly integral to our professional lives. Having a home office allows us to remain flexible with WFH and hybrid setups and provides us with the right ergonomics for work.

We’d no longer work with what was there; instead, the space is renovated and designed specifically for getting work done.

Get in Touch with an HDB Interior Design Firm in Singapore Today

Your home office shouldn’t be an afterthought to creating your living space. However, it shouldn’t be a disjointed mess either.

Intentional design means marrying your living space and your work space into one cohesive design scheme. This means taking into account how people live and use their space, as well as their design preferences, to achieve an aesthetically pleasing yet functional outcome.

Here at The Interior Lab, we’ve worked with dozens of interior designers for a wide range of rooms and properties. We’ve helped professionals in HDBs, young adults in flats, and business owners with landed homes integrate their lives into the flow of their space.

Build a home office into your space today! Get in touch with The Interior Lab.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I choose the right window treatments to prevent screen glare during afternoon meetings?

Consider opting for Venetian blinds. These allow you to tilt the slats to block direct sunlight. That way, you can clearly see your monitor.

How can I keep my home office cool and ventilated?

Keep your workspace near a window or away from a corner where air doesn’t flow. If those aren’t options, keep a humidifier and swivel fan nearby. Ventilation is crucial, whether you’re using a laptop or PC tower, since these devices need as much cooling as possible.

Is it okay to use part of my bedroom as a work area?

Yes, but it requires boundary setting to protect the quality of your sleep. Use a physical divider, like a bookshelf, so you don’t see your monitor from your pillow. Also, place your work area as far away from the bed as possible. The walk from your bed to your work area will prevent you from working while groggy.

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