Home Office, the Bauhaus Way

A serene view: The tranquil bay decorated with preserved terrain of shrubs and trees

The breeze brushing past my cheek slowly, wakens me up to the beautiful sea view unfolded before my eyes. I am up pretty high in the sky, but I am not on a mountain. This photo is captured right out of the window of my home office.

The mesmerizing moment comes when the sun shines onto you in the early morning after waking up from a slumber for work. The monthly rent of HKD$8500 for 600 sq ft in Hong Kong is expensive, but if you got lucky and take your time with apartment hunting, you have a chance to grab one of these serene lots, and with the peace awakened within your soul when you breathe into the salty wind, it's just priceless. That's even more wondrously gratifying when you have to work from home.

We got two rooms, so we decided one of them to be used as the office. Rooms in Hong Kong when you are not well-off (fresh graduate) could be a little crampy, and after living in this metropolitan concrete jungle for over 5 years I somehow obtain the sense of making the most out of space, while securing private corners without sacrificing comfort. Steamrolling my engineering training and blending it with the bauhaus design concept, I mix and match furniture I need in my mind and from what's already available. The landlady lent us the lot along with a few traditional chinese wood furniture and we think it's best not to buy too many things of our own since we are going to move in the future anyway. The room is about 3.2 meters by width (the side with windows) and 3.5 meters by length. Extremely small, by Malaysian standard which is.

Spacious working table and comfortable sofa bed for reflection

We didn't get to this arrangement from the very start but I knew that we need to have a huge working table, which is able to lay across on top of itself a desktop and a laptop while leaving some extra space by the length of an arm for document processing. We got the table from IKEA for about HKD$300. 

The sofa is a later addition, which itself could be stretched out into a sofa bed, providing us a double function. I am very particular about sofa. Since childhood, I have always been working and studying on a sofa. The past 4 years have been excruciatingly painful for me because you simply could not add an extra stool in your university dormitory, let alone a sofa (the university dorm is very small). Plus, the Hong Kong universities in general are very bureaucratic and they will simply freak out when you told them you want to buy your own furniture and have theirs temporarily cast away in storeroom. I remained utterly unhappy for the rest of my undergraduate years, trying to make myself comfortable on public sofa in the library while ignoring all those assaying eyes on you when you take off your slippers and pull your feet underneath your butt.

When you equip your office with a desktop, inevitably you would have to deal with all the cables and wires. We shrewdly hide them behind the table and the computers, while not stashing them too far out of reach so that cleaning is made easier. On the right hand side of the table we make the landlady's pot rack into one where a printer stands on the top, and the rest of stationery holders, connecting cables, wireless radio etc. on the racks beneath, cleverly creating a clean workstation. The pot rack itself is hidden away from sight by a open wardrobe. An unused polo luggage is laid on the side of the hidden from view rack, serving the purpose of CPU stand and also a place for handy stationery.

Printer on pot rack, and Polo luggage turned into a small table

Book rack and mobile reading lamp

The book rack completes the home office, allowing organization of personal, office and research documents. Perhaps you had already caught sight of the reading lamp in Photo 2, and here it appears again in Photo 4. By plugging the reading lamp to an electric socket right behind the sofa, it becomes a mobile light which could be simply put on the book rack for a casual reading experience on the sofa and the table while serious work has to be tended to properly.

For me, workstation is almost meant to be refreshing, clean and comfortable. By putting a little bit more effort into making the most use out of a space which is to be tailored to your purpose and also aesthetics, you could achieve wonders too, bauhaus-wise.