It Turns Out, Anyone Can Have the Perfect Home Office
If there is one quick way to waste a whole lot of money when decorating your home, it’s rushing a room’s completion by buying a matching set of furniture from one brand. A desk, wall cabinet, and accent table all from the same line. A bed with a matching dresser and nightstands. Same colors, same curves—Same! Same! Same! Unfortunately, it feels like men fall into this trap most often. They want their space finished, so they walk into a store they like, buy a coordinating bedroom, living-room, or home-office set, and bam. A lot of money down the drain for your home to look like a showroom.
Well-designed spaces take time. You want pieces to coordinate but not match, feel collected, and layer your textiles, woods, and stones. Some tension between stylistic eras goes a long way in keeping things interesting—it’s a process. One that has been radically improved, though, by one brand that suddenly has us breaking all our own rules.
Over the years, Esquire has tested and reviewed a lot of Soho Home products. We’ve awarded the cocktail glasses, the bar cabinets, the coffee tables, and the desks. We use Soho Home towels in our bathrooms and its lighting in our dens. The quality of the pieces is high, as is the aesthetic playfulness. Each collection bounces off the design and vibe of a different Soho House location, so there’s a wide variety of styles to choose from. London traditionalism, Danish cool, West Coast mid-century edge—it’s all there for cherry-picking.
As it has expanded its Soho Home interior-design studio operation—in the U.S., it now has outposts in Brooklyn, Nashville, Miami, L.A., Chicago, and Austin—the brand came to us with a pitch: Let us make over a room in one of your homes. We discussed the opportunity internally and ultimately decided that if there was a single interiors brand to challenge one of our core design beliefs, it was Soho Home.
There are two ways to begin the process of designing a room with the studio service: a virtual or in-person free consultation with an in-house designer. I trekked over to the Dumbo House studio to meet with Lyric Brigham and discuss my vision (an office that is tailored but relaxed and highly functional) and apprehension (matchy-matchiness; a room that feels out of place from the rest of my house). We discussed the aesthetic of my entire home and then, more broadly, had a conversation about what I gravitate toward in interiors.
It’s easy to see how this meeting could have been done virtually with ease—and I previewed the upcoming collection the way anyone would on Zoom, via a digital lookbook—though the benefit of being able to walk the showroom and see pieces in person, for scale and to test the comfort, was an undeniable plus. Seeing different textures, woods, and stones paired in curious arrangements was inspiring.
I left feeling like Lyric and I would work well together, and we decided to move forward with the project. Enlisting a designer to complete one room’s design plan costs $400 via the Soho Home studio, or you can work on up to three rooms for $650. If, at the next step, you go forward with ordering the furniture from the designer’s plan, you receive your design fee back to use as a voucher against your total bill.
The next steps were also simple: Go home, send Lyric the floor plan as well as an iPhone video walking the space and a few photos, and then … wait. As I had just moved in a few months prior, my space was totally empty and stark white. Still, I flagged a few things of my own that I wanted to incorporate: I would decorate the built-in shelves with my own books and record player, I wanted to keep the original light fixture overhead, and I planned to install an art TV over the fireplace. I also wanted to change the wall color—I would paint it—but I wanted Lyric’s input on what color would pair well with the furnishings.
The Soho Home studio service allows the designer three weeks to come up with plans for presentation. I received two. Both featured the Arranmore desk as the anchor piece—a stunning walnut burl desk with an organic edge inspired by Soho Roc House in Mykonos, Greece—but from there, the surroundings varied. One plan featured the Noelle modular sofa in a candy-cane-shaped arrangement in a corner; the other, two Theodore armchairs in a natural bouclé. Both were filled out with a variety of accent tables, lighting options, and cabinets. I felt like those decisions could be easily finalized once I could commit to the larger space-defining pieces.
The desk was a perfect fit. Soho Home has a lot of great desks, and I encourage you to explore them all, but I didn’t feel like I needed to see anything else after looking at the Arranmore. My house is in a heavily wooded area, and trees fill the view from every window. The organic edge felt like a way to bring the outside in. I was tempted by the sofa. It seemed so special. But I was determined not to have another room with a couch, and I felt that the armchair route was ultimately more functional for me. I told Lyric as much, but also flagged that I would love for her to lean into one of the more colorful Theodore options.
Revisions are a standard part of the process, and while this layer was the most substantial one we embarked on, it was not the last. Lyric came back to me with plans for two Theodore chairs in velvet Lichen, and then all the accent pieces flowed from there: the quartzite-topped Dorian Console Unit with the Furleigh Wall Mirror above, a Tisbury side table in a black-and-white marble, the Lachlan dining chair in velvet camel for behind the desk, and a variety of very cool lamps. We had plans for a natural-fiber rug to run across the center.
Lyric suggested a pinkish-beige paint for the walls—she’d originally suggested a lighter tan to pair with the bouclé chairs, but when we switched the fabric there, she altered her selection—and we all got to work. I cleaned and painted, and Lyric coordinated the delivery of all my items. Smaller items arrived via regular UPS/FedEx carriers, though their shipments were coordinated to all arrive across two days, and the white-glove delivery and installation of the larger items (desk, console, marble accent table, etc.) was scheduled for a single day.
Remember when I said revision was part of the process? That extends to day-of decisions. When the original rug was laid down, it became obvious an incorrect size had been dispatched. I texted a photo to Lyric, who confirmed as much but also suggested, after seeing the piece in my space, I look at new, more colorful options. As soon as she suggested it, I felt genuinely thrilled. The original selection was, indeed, not working in the space. Maybe it was the lighting, maybe it was the tone of my wood floors—who knows? We settled on the Locke rug, which would arrive via a separate white-glove delivery two weeks later.
Perfection is a process, as they say.
esquire
