Delaware.Net Office Remodel, and Our Cool New Desks

A few months ago, I became inspired to improve our office environment. My goals included:

1. Open up the space – we knocked down three walls in the office, combining the tech and design areas.
2. Bring in more natural light – knocking down the walls allowed more light in from the perimeter offices.
3. Get rid of barriers between people – all office desk hutches were disassembled and removed.
4. Improve lighting – replace flourecent lights with halogen spotlights and track lighting.
5. Improve the colors of the walls – we had the office painted with a warmer color.
6. Add more markerboards – we use markerboards a lot, so we got industrial markerboards from www.uwco.net.
7. New flooring – I wanted to remove all carpet from the floors, but we settled for having the carpets professionally cleaned.
8. Hang examples of our work – we created a wall of work examples that you pass as you walk into our office now.

After accomplishing all of these goals, I stepped back to admire our office space, and to see what else it needed to turn it into a true design studio. The thing that really jumped out at me is that we have collected quite an array of different computer desks over the years.  Some were 6 feet wide, some were 5 feet wide, and two were 4 feet wide.  All were made of that particle board that I hate.  So the next goal became:

1. Get new desks.

I looked at desks at local furniture stores, online, at office supply stores, and at sites like Herman Miller. Even the very expensive desks that were out there looked cheap to me.  One desk that looked interesting was the Milk desk, but that desk is $5000-$8000 for each desk.  You can see their cool site here:  http://www.milk.dk.    That Milk desk gave me some ideas for what we wanted.

One of my friends is a welder, and I thought about making a desk from sustainable materials.   I didn’t want the office to have recycled garbage in it, but I didn’t want particle board any longer either.  There had to be something in between.    I settled on making a frame for each desk out of metal, and then getting a flat surface for the top of each desk.

In speaking with my welder friend, we talked about steel or aluminum.   Steel would be inexpensive, but it would be heavy.  And it would rust. We agreed that a thick-wall aluminum square tubing frame would look the best, and would give the best strength. after sketching up 5 different designs on paper, we made the first prototype at his shop.

Here is the first prototype:

It looks really good in person.  And it only weighs about 10 pounds.

Here is what is coming next to finish the first prototype:

• Now we have a company manufacturing the surface for the desk out of architectural Corian that is translucent.
• A special cable box will mount underneath with a power strip inside.
• Power cabling will run through the desk tubing itself.
• There is a special surprise in the design that I will reveal when the desk is complete.