What your home office – healthy, messy or glam – says about your personality

Home working has risen because of pandemic social distancing. To make your home office work for you it has to fit your personality type, a design expert says

Do you need a Healthy Office with fitness equipment, a Hidden Office that disappears after work or a Tiny Office – the smaller the desk the less clutter?

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

A home office pictured in author An Bogaerts’ book Where We Work. For a home office to work it must fit your personality, she says, and describes several options. Photo: Tim Van de Velde Photography

Peta Tomlinson

Published: 7:15am, 10 Feb 2022

Show me your office and I’ll tell you who you are, says An Bogaerts, interior design journalist and author.

No judgment here, folks. Messy or zen, playful or glam, there’s no right or wrong when it comes to office design – and certainly no one size fits all.

In her latest book, Where We Work (Lannoo Publishers), Bogaerts takes on the role of a profiler matching individuals with their perfect (and most productive) home office. Like so many endeavours of the past two years, it is a product of the pandemic.

In publishing terms, its creation was a sprint, rather than a marathon. Barely eight months after conception in April 2020, by Christmas the book was on the shelves in Bogaerts’ home country of Belgium, and a year later, is now published internationally.

The Healthy Office, favoured by people who like to keep fitness equipment on hand, from Where We Work by An Bogaerts. Photo: Heimholz by Siehr

The idea dawned during the first lockdown in Antwerp, when “everyone was complaining about home working”. Deducing that this trend would not completely disappear after Covid-19, Bogaerts reached out to her network of interior designers and photographers looking for examples, then asking what worked and didn’t work from their clients’ perspective.