Office Design Ideas: 10 sq m Per Person, 500 Lux at Desk

Most office design ideas you will find are photographs of rooms nobody works in. A workspace either supports eight hours of concentration or it does not, and the difference is rarely the colour of the wall. It is how much room each person has, how much light lands on the desk, what the space does to sound, and whether the storage swallows the clutter or displays it. This guide works through those in order, with the figures the professional standards actually use, and then gets to the decorative decisions once the room works.

Start with the two numbers

Space per person. The British Council for Offices raised its recommended occupancy density to 10 sq m per person in its 2023 Guide to Specification, replacing the older split of 8 sq m for open plan and 10 sq m for cellular offices. The tighter 8 sq m figure is now treated as an exceptional case rather than a target. The reasoning is hybrid working: a modern office needs meeting space, quiet booths and collaboration areas as well as desks, and you cannot fit those in at high density.

For a home study, 10 sq m is a useful sanity check rather than a rule. A 2.5m by 3m box room comes in at 7.5 sq m, which works for one person with wall-mounted storage and will feel cramped with two. If two people work from home in the same room, plan for around 10 sq m each or accept that one of them will end up at the kitchen table.

Light on the desk. BS EN 12464-1 sets 500 lux of maintained illuminance on the task area for typing, reading and screen work, measured on the desk plane about 0.75m above the floor. Reception desks and filing areas drop to 300 lux, technical drawing rises to 750. The standard also sets a uniformity figure, which is the polite way of saying one bright pool in the middle of a dark room does not count.

Almost no domestic room hits 500 lux from a ceiling pendant alone. The practical answer is layered: ambient light overhead, then a task lamp on the desk doing the real work. That is one of the few pieces of commercial specification that translates directly into a house.

Layout ideas that suit London houses

Space in a London home is rarely a spare square room, so the good solutions are usually borrowed from somewhere else.

Chimney breast alcoves. A Victorian or Edwardian terrace gives you two alcoves roughly 600 to 900mm deep, which is desk depth. A fitted desktop across one alcove with shelving above uses dead space and leaves the floor clear. Do both alcoves and you have a desk and a storage wall in a room that also does something else.

Under the stairs. Workable if the headroom at the seated position is genuine and there is a socket. It is the worst place in the house for light and one of the worst for noise, so it suits short admin sessions rather than a full working day.

The half-landing or wide hallway. A shallow desk 450 to 500mm deep against a wall does not obstruct a hallway of normal width, and hallways in period houses often have better daylight than the rooms off them. See our hallway design ideas for how to keep it looking like part of the house.

A corner of the bedroom. It works if you can close the desk down at the end of the day, which is why bureau-style and cabinet desks have come back. Working in eyeshot of an unmade desk is the thing people report disliking most about home working.

The garden room. The only option that gives you a genuinely separate space, at the cost of a building. Worth it if you are on video calls all day and the alternative is a landing.

Desk facing the window or the room? Facing the window gives you daylight and a view and puts the brightest thing in the space directly behind your screen, which is hard on the eyes and terrible on camera. Facing away from the window puts the window behind you, which blows out the camera exposure. The best position for both is side-on to the window, with the screen perpendicular to the glass.

Sound: the thing that ruins a good-looking room

A study with a hard floor, a large desk, a screen and one bookshelf is an acoustically live box, and it makes every call sound thin. Period London houses make it worse, because you are usually one brick’s width from a neighbour and one floorboard from a hallway.

The cheap fixes do most of the work: a rug with an underlay, full-length lined curtains rather than a blind, a bookcase with actual books on it, and an upholstered chair. If the room is used for recorded calls, a few acoustic panels on the first reflection points, meaning the wall to either side of where you sit, will do more than anything else you can buy for the money.

For the noise coming through rather than bouncing around, the weak points in order are the door, the floor and the party wall. A solid core door with brush seals costs a fraction of any wall treatment and fixes the most common complaint.

Storage, and the rule that keeps a home office looking like a room

Every workspace generates paper, cables and equipment that has no natural home. The rule that works is simple: closed storage at eye level and above, open shelving only for things you are happy to look at. Reverse that and the room reads as clutter no matter how good the joinery.

Built-in is nearly always the right answer in a London house because the walls are not straight and the alcoves are not standard widths. Budget accordingly: fitted joinery is one of the larger line items in a room like this, and our interior design cost per room page has realistic ranges.

Plan power before joinery, not after. Two double sockets at desk height at the back of the desktop, plus a cable route down to a floor socket, removes the trailing extension lead that otherwise defines the room. Under-desk cable trays cost very little and are impossible to retrofit neatly once a desktop is fixed.

Colour, materials and the video-call background

Colour matters less than the brochures suggest, but two things are worth knowing. Very dark walls eat light, so a deep green or navy study needs materially more lighting to reach the same working brightness. And a matt finish on the wall behind you reads far better on camera than anything with a sheen, which throws a bright patch straight into the lens.

Warm neutrals and mid-tone greens are the most forgiving backdrops, because they flatter skin tones on camera without drawing attention. If you want a strong colour, put it on the wall you face rather than the wall behind you. Our kitchen colour ideas page covers the same principle of testing paint in the actual light of the room.

For the desk surface, a hardwearing laminate or oiled timber both work. Avoid high-gloss white, which reflects your own task lamp back at you.

Ergonomics, and the rules that apply even at home

The Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations apply to anyone who uses a screen daily for continuous periods of an hour or more, and the HSE is explicit that home workers are covered along with fixed and mobile workers. If you employ anyone who works from home, a workstation assessment, DSE training and eye tests on request are your legal responsibility, not theirs.

The design consequences are practical: room for an adjustable chair to be pushed back, a desk deep enough that the screen sits an arm’s length away, the top of the screen roughly at eye level, and enough desk width that a keyboard and mouse do not force the shoulders forward. Those requirements set a minimum desk footprint of about 1200mm wide by 700mm deep for a single screen, and 1600mm for two.

What it costs to do properly

A study built out with fitted joinery, proper lighting on separate circuits, acoustic treatment and new power is a full room project rather than a furniture purchase. In London, that puts it in the same bracket as a bedroom or hallway refit rather than the smallest jobs. If you are pricing a designer’s involvement, interior designer cost in London sets out the fee models, and the interior design budget planner will let you test the numbers against your own room.

Frequently asked questions

How much space do you need per person in an office? The British Council for Offices recommends 10 sq m per person in its 2023 Guide to Specification, up from the older 8 sq m open-plan figure, which is now treated as an exceptional case. The increase reflects hybrid working, where an office needs meeting rooms, quiet space and collaboration areas alongside desks.

How bright should office lighting be? BS EN 12464-1 sets 500 lux maintained on the task area for typing, reading and screen work, measured at desk height around 0.75m. Reception and filing areas need 300 lux and technical drawing 750. A ceiling light alone rarely achieves it in a domestic room, so add a task lamp at the desk.

Should a desk face the window? Side-on to the window is best. Facing the window puts a bright light source directly behind your screen and strains the eyes; sitting with your back to the window means the camera exposes for the glare behind you and leaves your face dark. Perpendicular to the glass solves both.

What is the minimum size for a home office? Around 7 to 8 sq m works for one person with wall-mounted storage, though it will feel tight. Allow roughly 10 sq m per person if two people work in the same room. The desk itself needs about 1200mm by 700mm for a single screen and 1600mm wide for two.

How do you soundproof a home office cheaply? Deal with the door first, because a solid core door with brush seals stops most of the noise coming through for a modest cost. Then add soft mass inside the room: a rug with underlay, lined curtains, a filled bookcase and an upholstered chair. Acoustic panels on the walls either side of where you sit help most on calls.

Do DSE regulations apply to people working from home? Yes. The HSE states that the Display Screen Equipment Regulations cover home workers as well as fixed and mobile workers, where someone uses a screen daily for continuous periods of an hour or more. Employers must carry out workstation assessments, provide training and fund eye tests on request.