How to transform your home office with colour

We’ve used the new Pantone colours of the year as an opportunity to show you a home office scenario with all the essentials for a creative, productive and happy day at work – at least where the hardware is concerned. You can read more about the new colour trends in our magazine and the next K+N Newsletter .

Decision-makers at the world-famous institute picked a duo of colours for 2021. It consists of “Ultimate Grey” and “Illuminating”, a pale grey and a sunny yellow. Our magazine feature goes into more detail about why they chose two colours this year. We asked our interior architect Carina Hölzer to provide some creative inspiration and ideas for using the colours to achieve a stunning effect in your home office.

Your working environment is important for inner balance, productivity and motivation. Design your workspace to reflect who you are. Whether it’s a separate room or a work corner, you need to be able to shut the door when evening comes, or turn your back on your desk. One elegant way of doing this is to set boundaries with colours or themes. Visual effects are helpful in practical terms. Carina Hölzer’s ideas for creating separate spaces involve an accent wall or photo wallpaper. It’s best to use water-based acrylic paint for your accent wall. This makes painting as straightforward as possible, and keeps odour at a minimum. Maybe a sunny yellow shade like Illuminating will give you a lift? Or you can boost your concentration with a calm blue or a grey like Ultimate Grey? Create a more individual feel with photo wallpaper. The advantage is that you can use your own pictures at a suitable resolution. But there are also plenty to choose from in the shops.

Even though it started as a makeshift solution, and change is within sight – now’s the right time for outfitting your workspace. Our furnishing expert Carina Hölzer recommends:

• an ergonomic, height adjustable desk (such as TALO.YOU), if you are short of space a foldaway nesting table on castors is a practical alternative
• a lightweight office chair (such as the K+N NOOK)
• good workstation lighting (for instance Pipe or Come together from Artemide)
• somewhere to store books and literature
• lockable storage for laptop and confidential documents (e.g. our PERSONALBOX)
• personal accessories to make you feel good
• a box for utensils and office materials (e.g. our TOOLBOX)
• house plants to improve the air quality and create a relaxing atmosphere
• a write-on surface for a daily To Do list (a chalk board is used here)

=> ideally there should be a window view so that you can look outside from time to time, which rests your eyes and shifts your mental perspective