Designing a home office for your teens

Seasons in Colour founder and creative director, Jenny Kakoudis shares her experiences and advices when it comes to creating an inspiring and productive workspace for when your little ones have homework. #hallningfeatured

Today’s post is about designing a new home office for a pre-teen and changing a spare room, from rather unremarkable to inspiring (without overwhelming). After all, the aim is to help them focus and not think this is a new play area!

If your kids have recently started their secondary school, one thing immediately becomes apparent: they have far too many subjects and textbooks, notepads, stationaries and printouts. And with homework being progressively harder, it’s great for kids to have a space to do their work in a focused and organised way.

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Before..

This is what they started with. This room is an average-sized room with some kind of large recess in the wall that happened to fit two large wardrobes perfectly. This room has served occasionally as an additional guest bedroom but mostly it is just a room that doesn’t even air that much, it sees no foot traffic at all.

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Fast forward to the start of her son’s secondary school, somehow this kind of set up in the kid’s room just didn’t seem to be that great. There was simply not enough storage to get a 11-year-old organised in the way they wanted him to.

Therefore, changes were made to this bedroom. Later on, to accommodate the reading during the last two years of primary school showed Jenny that there was still a lot of room for improvement and that they were not using the space correctly. “We could’ve made a lot of changes in here, but we would need to call in a joiner and custom build storage and a desk to make this room great”. That was not an option due to cost.

At some point, Jenny even thought that they should remove part of the wall to the left of the bed and unite this bedroom with the spare bedroom to create one large play and workroom (with one access point/door completely replaced with anew wall). Again that seemed excessive from a cost perspective and it would also devalue the house by losing one bedroom.

In the end, logic prevailed and we just gave the spare bedroom a new lease of life.

Their Inspiration

Every room you design usually has some problem areas that need addressing. It could be the wall colour, the lighting, the storage etc.

This room needed the following:

1. Create a seating area for at least two people, so that when the kid needs help with homework, we can both seat together.

2. Use colour to help focus – we will be inspired by the blogging office next door for that.

3. Add storage for a reading nook and for organising schoolwork by subject.

Having the above in mind, they looked up for projects that they liked on Pinterest and saved the ones that resonated the most with the aesthetic. The kind of style they would go for could be summarised as including industrial vibes, one dark wall, pops of mustard yellow, wall-hung storage, a long working surface.

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What they did:

1. The wardrobes stayed put and with their current wallpaper on – for the time being!

2. Wall behind the desk painted in Dulux Cobalt Night.

3. Moved 2 desks from her office and from the kid’s room in here to create a longer working surface, to accommodate the computer screen and writing area.

4. Moved the bookcase from my office for extra storage and to create a reading nook.

5. Added wall shelves about the desk.

6. Moved the orange floor lamp from the kid’s room here, together with a garden bean bag that would otherwise be stored in our shed throughout winter. This way a comfortable and cosy reading nook is created.

7. Added a new office chair the HAG CAPISCO Puls 8020 chair with extra cushion for comfort. It is completely configurable in terms of colour, headrest and footrest and it is very very comfortable. You can also sit back to front which she loves!