Ah, yes, what a nice, organized home office! If only it really looked this way.
This week on the Skirted Roundtable (HERE), Linda, Megan and I take the discussion on home offices that started last week with Vicente Wolf a step further. Renowned interior designer Wolf thinks a home office is a terrible idea and that one should look for a “real” office, not matter how small it might be. His opinion on home offices elicited a lot of comments from listeners and provoked much thought on our part - you see, all three of us have home offices ourselves!
My pride and joy: an antique map of Rome glued onto a board that weighs about 1,000 pounds! I had to hire three moving men just to get it upstairs. Yes, upstairs. You see – besides having a home office, mine is actually located upstairs in one of our extra bedrooms. Do you understand now why I mostly see clients at their own house?
I am thinking of remodeling Webb Design’s office and putting up a wall of bookcases where the red cabinet is, which truly needs to be painted black anyway. I have no idea why I bought it in red, but that was years ago during my English Country Manor phase and I had many red accents in my house. It came from a store in the Rice Village called The El Paso Import Company. If I do put the bookcase there, the map would need to go and I’d have to call those three men again and have them lug it back down the stairs to my real office – the garage! My desk is actually a small dining room table that I bought from Pier One. The big tin box on top of the desk holds all the office necessities like staplers and scissors and rulers – since I don’t have drawers. For some reason, desks are much more expensive than dining tables so I often recommend that clients look for a table at Crate and Barrel or Pottery Barn, etc. instead of trying to find a reasonably priced desk. In addition – table tops are usually bigger than desktops which is wonderful to spread out papers and computers and furniture catalogues. The lamps all came from Tar-ge’ as did the window shades. The antique bamboo chair is from my friend, Mindy Brown’s childhood bedroom! Hi Mindy! I’m not sure how I ended up with that one!
On one side of my office I have this antique work cart that I bought from Chateau Domingue. It holds all my clippings folders and furniture catalogues which I really never use anymore. Most companies are online now and the days of catalogues and binders are slowly going away. I truly never open a binder anymore. It all comes from the internet.
I redid the closet in my office to make it into a sample room. The entire closet is filled with baskets of samples and the closet floor is piled with bags filled with more fabric samples. These are the ones I don’t even use. The more current samples are in my other office, you know, the garage. Hundreds of sample books are piled against the wall of the closet and the newer ones are, you know where. I have run out of space in my office – perhaps Vicente Wolf has a point after all. I really need either more space or I need to throw things out. I recently got a flyer at my from door from Green Junk. You hire these people to come to your house and they clean it out and take it all away and recycle it! They take away things like old appliances, electronics, computers ( I have my fair share of old computers!), papers, boxes, fabric samples, binders of obsolete furniture companies – they come in and haul it all away. I am seriously thinking of calling them because what always stops me cold from reorganizing my office myself is the thought of lugging all the trash down the stairs – to put it where? On the curb? Green Junk may be the perfect answer for me. Maybe I should just call that communist Van Jones and ask his advice on Green Junk.
What is really looks like when it’s not cleaned up for the pictures! Hey, I actually look like a busy interior designer here!
Be sure to listen to this week’s Skirted Roundtable where we discuss home offices AND what goes on during our first meetings with clients. To listen, go HERE.