Multifunctional office guide by The Sanyas Home
As many of us are balancing work between the office and home, there’s a need now more than ever for households to have a home office space. Finding the perfect balance between decorative and practical is easy, and you don’t need a big budget either. In this guide we will share 6 tips to creating a multifunctional office to take your work from home space up a level.
We planned on turning our guest room into an office, however then had a dilemma of where our guests would stay when they came to visit. We then realised we needed a multifunctional room which we could use both as an office during the day, and a guest room when needed. In this guide we will share our top tips for getting the most out of your multifunctional office space, alongside what materials we used for our room transformation.
Multifunctional office space – the tools & materials we used:
- Green sofa bed
- Blush pink velvet chair
- Bamboo bookshelf
- Cordless drill driver
- White paint
- Artificial banana tree
- Gold metal round wall shelf
- Desk
- Gold spray paint
Multifunctional office space: 6 top tips
1. Decide on the room and what you want out of the space
First things first, you need to identify which room you can make multifunctional. Do you have a room in the house that is perhaps not being fully utilised?
We picked our guest room as the ideal room to turn into our multifunctional office, which was a recent addition to our house when our extension was built. Initially it only had a bed in here which took up the majority of the space and didn’t allow for the room to be used for other purposes, and with guests only staying on the odd occasions, we felt it was not being properly utilised.
We knew we wanted the space to be multifunctional; a place where we can work and a place where our guests can come and spend the night. Knowing what we wanted to use the room for helped us with how to maximise the space and choose the furniture we needed.
2. Compile a list of items you will need in your multifunctional room
Measure up the room first and then plan out your space. As with most offices, it’s ideal to have a desk where you can work from. We wanted a compact desk as the room needed to cater for other furniture as well.
Once we found the right desk, we began searching for a sofa bed – the bed element can be used by our guests and the sofa by us when taking a break from work.
We opted for a sofa bed instead of a bed, as it takes up less space in the room when the bed element of the sofa bed is not in use. Therefore, this multifunctional piece of furniture allows us to fit more in the room.
We particularly like the idea of having books on display in the office, so we chose the bamboo bookshelf, as not only is it practical but it also looks great.
We needed a chair we could use when sat at the desk but also somewhere we could sit when recording video content, so we decided to go for more of a feature chair than the traditional desk chair. In a multifunctional room, it is always worth picking furniture that can serve a number of purposes.
3. Try upcycling furniture
Prior to buying new items, it is worth having a look around your house to see if there are any key pieces you already have that might be worth upcycling to match the aesthetics of the multifunctional room.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have any suitable furniture to upcycle, and we therefore decided to get a cost-effective desk that we could upcycle to match the aesthetics of the room. We opted for a finishing coat of while on the wood surface and then gold for the metal legs.
When upcycling, you can follow these simple steps:
- Sand the wood surface as this will allow the paint to bond well to the wood
- Prime the wood surface as this increases the durability of the painting job, helps protect the wood and creates a smooth surface for the finish coat
- Paint the wood surface to your desired colour
- Consider spray painting any metal pieces to your desired colour
4. Consider doing an upholstery DIY
If you already have a sofa or chair in your house that needs sprucing up, you could perform an upholstery DIY on it and add it to your multifunctional space.
We chose to perform an upholstery DIY on the sofa bed and turned it into a boucle sofa bed, as we currently love this material and aesthetic. This was really simple as we only needed the boucle material, scissors and staple gun.
The great thing about how we performed the upholstery is that if we ever get tired of the boucle trend, we can easily take the material off and utilise the sofa bed in its original colour and material.
5. Accessorise the room
Adding accessory items such as plants, wall art, vases etc is a great way to bring your multi-functional office to life.
As our main accessory pieces, we chose to add an artificial banana tree and we really love what it does to the space. We also added the ManoMano gold metal round wall shelf behind the desk for some stylish storage.
6. Arrange your multifunctional office
Ah, the final result where all the hard work is now visible. Given you’ve carefully planned your space well, you should now be able to move the furniture in the right places to maximise the space. For our space, the sofa bed is better placed in front of the window, whilst the desk and the bookshelf were better positioned by the wall in the middle of the room.
We are super pleased with how the space has turned out! The multifunctional office looks inviting and with the sofa bed upholstered and the desk painted white, it makes the room feel really spacious.
We are Tunde and Konge Sanya of @the.sanyashome. We’ve been married for 6 years and together we live in a 1930’s semi-detached house with our 9 month old daughter, Arielle. We have been renovating our house for just over 4 years, and recently added a wrap around extension.
