Mom’s Home Office Refresh – Part 1

Today we are continuing with our series on the quick refresh we are giving My Parents’ Home. Once our plan for their living room was sorted, we moved on to mom’s home office refresh.

Mom is a psychological counselor who has a small consulting room at home itself. Being a counselor means there are certain special requirements for her office, which we had to keep in mind while designing the space.

To explain these, let me first begin with the plan.

The Plan:

As you can see from this plan, the bedroom being used as the home office is right next to the main entrance of the home.

A very important part of being a counselor is maintaining client confidentiality, so using an exterior bedroom worked well for us. We have two entrances to the office, one from within the house, from the living room. The other is through the passageway, from outside the house.

This means, when a client comes in, they can enter the consulting room without entering the home. This ensures that they don’t meet any other family members and their privacy is maintained.

Mom, on the other hand, can enter and leave the office from the living room.

The other important thing to keep in mind was that the office also works as the guest room when my parents have overnight guests.

The requirements for this room to work as an office are simple enough. A comfortable chair for mom to sit on, and a comfortable couch for the client is all we needed.

Making sure my parents can use this as a guest room was simple too. We used a sofa cum bed for the couch.

The Tiny Bathroom:

The other thing we had to take care of was the bathroom. As you can see in the plan above, it is really tiny.

The small powder room works perfectly for the office, but what about a shower for the guests?

Here’s what we did to take care of that problem.

The wardrobe shutters you see here are deceptive. The door in the centre is actually the bathroom door. We pulled the bathroom door outwards, in line with the wardrobe shutters. This gave us a little more space inside the bathroom. This shift normally wouldn’t make much of a difference. But in such a tiny bathroom it made a big difference, enough to fit in a shower between the WC and the basin.

Home Office Refresh:

We’re changing none of what we’ve described above. The plan is just as perfect for the office now as it was 8 years back, when we first designed it.

So then what is this home office refresh about? It’s exactly that.. just a ‘refresh’.

As you enter the office, this is what you see. That gorgeous chair is one of my favourite pieces of furniture in my parents’ home. But as you can see from its upholstery, it does not belong in this room. Mom couldn’t find a comfortable chair for herself, so she picked up this one from the living room and brought it into her office.

We’ll get her a chair she likes so that we can return this one to the living room.

The rug is terribly small for this space, so a larger rug is in order.

And the sofa covers have become stretched and loose.. and those need to be changed too.

This room has all the basics right. What it needs now is just a little bit of tender love and care. And that’s what this home office refresh is all about.

That ends our short and sweet introduction to this small and sweet room. We’ll be back with the reveal soon, so sign up here to make sure you don’t miss it.

Until next time,