Tips & Tricks for Styling Your Home Office
Does your home office feel dull and uninspiring? When working from home, you need a space that motivates and energises you, and makes you feel ready to take on the day. Not just a box room with a desk pushed into a corner and four blank walls staring back at you.
We get it – if you work from home often, you probably want to shut your office door at the end of a long day and not set foot in there again until 9am. But upgrading your home office space is actually far easier, and quicker, than you might think. Here are our home office styling ideas to get you started.
Top 5 home office styling ideas
1) Set the scene behind your screen
Video calls are now part of everyday working life, meaning your background plays a starring role in every meeting. Wallpaper is one of the easiest ways to create a distinctive backdrop without adding clutter. Skip any patterns that feel too busy or oversized, as they could become distracting on screen. Reach for designs with a little movement instead – a soft botanical print like Up the Garden Path or a simple calming stripe like Spotty Stripe are ideal for home offices.
If wallpaper isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other ways to create a visually interesting background. You could pin some family photos to a noticeboard or dress some floating shelves with your favourite objects to give your meeting guests something to look at.
2) Soften the room with fabric
Home offices are filled with hard surfaces: a laptop, a desk, a filing cabinet, and an awkwardly-placed radiator. Fabric is the fastest way to take the edge off all that hardness, both literally and visually.
Curtains and blinds help to absorb sound as well as light, which is important when your days are spent on video calls. Roman blinds are particularly good at this: you can raise them by just a few centimetres to knock the glare off your screen without losing the room to darkness. An upholstered chair or cushion adds another layer of softness, which is particularly useful if your room is packed with timber, painted furniture, and technology.
3) Let colour set the mood
There’s nothing worse than sitting in a dull, drab home office for hours upon hours every day. Colour can completely change the atmosphere of your space and influence your mood while you’re working.
Start by thinking about how you want your space to feel, and then choose a colour that reflects this perfectly. Soft greens and blues help to create a serene and tranquil setting, while warmer shades (muted ochre, terracotta, dusty rose) bring energy and encourage creativity. We recommend sticking to three colours in a 70:20:10 split, with one dominant neutral, one supporting colour, and a small pop of colour for decorative accents.
4) Play with pattern and scale
Like colour, pattern can shift the entire ambience of your workspace. Gentle geometrics, loose organic motifs, stripes, and circles all have a calming effect; while sharper shapes like diamonds and zigzags bring life and movement.
The trick to avoiding a mismatched room is scale. Pair a smaller motif with a larger one, and then tie them together with a shared colour. For example, you could combine a small cushion in our geometric Lattice Leaf design in Moss & Cornflower with a Roman blind in Sunflower in Moss. This combination of prints will sit comfortably against each other rather than fighting for attention.
5) Bring a touch of nature to your desk
With all the static technology, your desk needs something alive to stop it feeling clinical. Plants and flowers sit beautifully in our workspaces, bringing a touch of the outdoors in and giving your eyes somewhere to rest between video calls.
Large leafy plants can help to soften those hard corners, while a small vase of seasonal flowers brings colour and vibrancy to your desk without taking up much room. If you want something you don’t have to water, you could opt for cut foliage, dried seeds heads, or a handful of bare branches instead. Place your chosen plants or flowers on a shelf behind you to bring some visual interest to your backdrop on video calls.
Give your home office a refresh with Vanessa Arbuthnott Fabrics
We offer a fantastic selection of nature-inspired fabrics and quality made to measure pieces that are perfect for bringing a touch of the Cotswold countryside into your home office. All our fabrics are available to purchase by the metre – or we can craft made to measure curtains, blinds, furniture or soft furnishings in your chosen fabric to your exact measurements.
Need a hand pulling your office scheme together? Our in-house interior designer, Tania, offers free design consultations to get you started. You can walk her through your home office setup, and she’ll talk you through different options for fabrics, colours, and patterns that will look right at home in your space.
Book your slot today to bring your home office vision to life.
FAQs
What fabric is best for a home office?
Linen union fabrics work well in home offices, as they are hardwearing enough for daily use and soften beautifully with age. For home office curtains or blinds, look for a fabric with a little movement in the pattern, like a delicate botanical or a simple stripe.
What blinds work best for a home office?
Roman blinds are ideal for home offices, allowing you to adjust the light precisely. They can be raised in stages to manage glare on your screen, without completely blocking natural light coming in from the window.
What colours are best for a home office?
There is no single ‘best’ colour for a home office. It all comes down to what mood you want to create. Soft greens and blues create a calm and restorative mood, while warmer tones like muted ochre, terracotta, or dusty rose bring energy into the space.
How much pattern is too much in a small home office?
There’s no fixed limit to how much pattern is too much in a smaller space. However, we recommend selecting one dominant pattern and one supporting pattern, unified by a shared colour palette. Discover more in our blog post on ‘combining colour and pattern’.
We sell fabrics exclusively designed by Vanessa Arbuthnott, along side small, bespoke collection of Made to Measure items which includes curtains, blinds, sofas, footstools, chairs, headboards, and quilts, all handmade specially for you by master crafts people.
