New features in furniture hide, organize electronics
July 2nd, 2007 Category Furniture, Home Furniture, Office Furniture
Cell phone chargers are scattered across the kitchen counter (one for each phone in the family). The computer sits on the dining room table, cords snaking around the ankles of anyone who sits down to work. No matter how tidy the bedroom, it still looks cluttered with electronics and personal papers overflowing the dresser.
Sound familiar?
Most home offices aren’t offices. We’ve carved out corners of space in dining rooms, dens and bedrooms, then filled the space with hand-me-down furniture — the cast-off desk from the kids’ room when their computer desk was installed, a spare kitchen chair, an old bureau-turned-filing cabinet — not to mention climbing over the treadmill to get to the computer workstation. Even if you’ve gone wireless, you still need a place to dock.
“Consumers are looking for home furnishings that make their lives easier,” says Jackie Hirschhaut, vice president of the American Home Furnishings Alliance. “Hidden storage, connectivity, charging stations … these are all important innovations to the category shoppers are embracing. As long as their are new electronics and technology devices, there will be a demand for multifunctional home office solutions.”
Function, storage and organization are key elements needed in home office furnishings — without looking like “office furniture.”
The same is true in modular home office furnishings, such as Techline. “When people come in, they have a certain look in mind, but functionality usually wins out. People want wood veneers, they want nice-looking pieces, and they want the printer that fits in a cabinet with a pull-out shelf, the desk where they can shut down the laptop and slide it under and out of the way. They don’t want any stuff showing when they’re not working,” says Brian Nichols of Techline Studio in Waterloo.
Consumers also want quality and a sense of timeless design. “The way people work changes, and they want furniture that can change with them. They’ll buy a modular piece or two and come back a few years later to add something else, and they want it all to fit and work together,” he explains.
Many home manufacturers are adapting the Techline approach to their collections. At this spring’s High Point, N.C. international home furnishings market, manufacturers unveiled new home office furnishings that are flexible and adaptable, while managing to look attractive in a room. Riverside Furniture, for example, introduced the “Cobble Hill” laptop cocktail table. It has classic coffee table styling in black or white finish, but a portion of the tabletop glides out to serve as a laptop surface. It includes storage space for files, printer or scanner and a power port in the storage space. The company also introduced a barrel roll top desk in a medium-distressed black finish that is roomy enough for electronics.
Sligh plays off English manor living in the “Tahoe” collection, which includes two pedestal desks, a credenza, file cabinet and bookcase. An upscale collection, “Mira,” features Neoclassic designs highlighted in mahogany and silver-pearl finish hardware. Features include built-in surge suppressor and docking ports for computers, cameras and other electronics.
Hooker’s “Smart Hutch” sits atop the “Danforth” home office desk and has two interchangeable box drawers, one for electrical outlets and power charging stations. Roll-top designs also are making a comeback at Hooker, roomy enough to keep laptops and flatscreen monitors hidden.
Broyhill has expanded their best-selling furniture collections by adding home office groups to each. Executive desks, credenza desks, credenza hutches and lateral files add more function without losing style.
Lane has added a writing desk to their National Geographic Home Collection, “Italia,” that would make a good home for a wireless laptop, while Stanley’s new “Sunset Key” collection offers an oval desk with pedestal base and cherry veneer top.
Resources:
www.lanefurniture.com
www.riverside-furniture.com
www.sligh.com
www.stanleyfurniture.com
www.broyhillfurniture.com
www.hookerfurniture.com
ww.aspenhome.net
