Interior design company Havenly shares their top 5 insider design tips with PrintWithMe for refreshing your home office for the holidays.
For years, the holiday season is when many of us enjoy decorating our homes, patios, and if you’re a Property Manager, your apartment residents' common areas. While many of us are confined within our home offices in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is even more important to stretch our creative muscles and reimagine how our holiday purchases can contribute to a more joyful, inspiring, and productive work-from-home environment.
Not sure where to start? PrintWithMe had gathered five easy-to-implement decorating tips from our friends at Havenly, an online interior design company that provides customers highly personalized and affordable interior design consultation:
1. Invest in wall arts
Thomas Lloyd, a designer at Havenly, shared with us that in addition to making an office space functional, it is also important to make your space inspiring. Enter wall arts.
It’s not only about time we refresh our Zoom background. Investing in an inspiring art piece to go onto the walls of your home office can help elevate your mood and create mental boundaries in your space. For an extra holiday touch, consider office artwork that brings the outdoors in and celebrates the season.
Online retailers like Society6 and Fine Art America are great places to start with your search for home office artwork. For a more personalized and unique space, you can even commission artists whose artistic style resonates with yours to create a customized piece for your home. You can find artists either locally or on Etsy.
Here’s one of our favorite home office pieces from Society6:
2. Take advantage of holiday sales
One of the challenges for transitioning from an onsite workplace environment to a work-from-home space is that many individuals do not have designated office areas in their homes, and perhaps do not have the necessary office furniture and tools needed to perform daily tasks in privacy. Often the lines between home life and work life are blurred in work-from-home spaces, and it can be tough to spend so many hours in one place.
“You can have a lot of pieces that look super stylish but when it comes to actually working there, it has to be an environment that you actually want to sit down and spend six to eight hours a day in,” said Lloyd.
Here’s the good news! The holiday season is packed with deals and discounts you can take advantage of such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and don’t forget Small Business Saturday – the day after Black Friday to support local independent businesses – if you’re planning on investing in quality home office furniture pieces.
Learn more about how to maximize your investment by purchasing multi-functional furniture suited for a work-from-home environment in this blog by Havenly.
3. Clear the clutter
Don’t wait until Spring for a spring cleaning. The holiday is a great time to clear out the clutter in your home, especially your work-from-home office.
“The lack of physical barrier about working from home makes setting a routine difficult but crucial to a healthy and functional workspace,” said Lloyd. He suggested investing in clutter solutions and desk accessories to help organize your space while adding flair to the design as well.
“For example, if you’re working with a lot of papers, invest in a great looking paperweight,” said Lloyd.
Check out these cute and affordable accessories for your desk!
4. Add holiday cheer to your surface areas
If you are spending most of your time at the desk, why not inject some holiday spirit with fun and delightful knick-knacks and candles? Seeing cheerful holiday decor can help to increase your happiness at work, while also creating a space that more closely resembles seasonal, pre-COVID onsite holiday decorations.
As Lloyd suggested, you can either spruce up your entire workspace with holiday decorations or you can target smaller areas like your work desk by adding colors, textures, and scent to make it feel cozy and welcoming.
The most straightforward way is to light up candles of your favorite scents. From pumpkin spice to sandalwood, there are so many artisanal candle companies that offer scents that could remind you of your hometown, ones that boost your productivity or to support a good cause.
5. Engage your friends and family in your decoration and design journey
Whether you are a pro interior designer, or if you’re completely new to design, it’s always nice to have input from others on decor decisions – especially when it comes to big purchases like couches, desks, or bookcases.
“Some of our customers turn to us [Havenly] simply to validate their design direction and their purchases,” said Lloyd.
To help you optimize your design decisions, consider turning the decoration of your home office into a social-distancing activity that you can do with your family, roommates, or friends – either in person or virtually.
Start by creating a collaborative Pinterest board. Also, explore these apps with augmented reality capability to help you recreate the in-person shopping experience while connecting with your friends and family over Zoom!
We hope these home office design tips help to bring some more cheer to your holiday season! We know that staying productive and inspired is extremely important during these uncertain times, and we hope your home office refresh journey is a fun and relaxing one.
Companies like PrintWithMe and Havenly are dedicated to providing convenient solutions, from printing to interior design, to busy professionals like yourself to help you save time and money.
Learn more about PrintWithMe here or get in touch today!
