Most home office discomfort comes from four measurements, and all four are decided when the furniture is bought or placed. Getting them right costs nothing extra; getting them wrong is felt every day.
Desk height: 28 to 30 inches, adjusted to you
The standard is 29 to 30 inches and it was set for an average that most people are not.
The correct height is the one where, sitting with your feet flat and your back supported, your forearms are parallel to the floor and your elbows are at about 90 degrees.
Rough guide by height: under 5'4" wants 26 to 28 inches; 5'4" to 5'10" wants 28 to 29; over 5'10" wants 30 to 31.
If you cannot change the desk, change the chair and add a footrest. A chair raised to suit the desk with feet dangling is worse than the original problem.
See the desks.
Depth: 24 to 30 inches
Depth is set by the monitor. You want the screen an arm's length away, about 20 to 30 inches from your eyes, and that needs the desk to be deep enough for the stand plus the distance.
24 inches is the minimum for a single monitor and it is tight with a deep stand. 30 inches is comfortable and takes a monitor plus space to write in front of the keyboard. Beyond 36 inches the far edge is out of reach and becomes a shelf.
For two monitors, prioritise width over depth: 60 inches wide rather than 36 deep.
Knee clearance, the spec nobody lists
Measure from the floor to the underside of the desk, or to the bottom of any drawer or apron.
You want at least 24 inches of clear height and 20 inches of clear width. A desk with a shallow center drawer often leaves 22 inches, and you sit with your thighs against it all day.
This is the most common complaint about desks that otherwise look perfect, and it appears in almost no product description. Ask for the figure before buying.
Where to put it relative to the window
This matters more than people expect and it is free to get right.
Best: side-on to the window. Daylight across the desk, no glare on the screen, no silhouette on video calls.
Acceptable: facing the window, if you can control the light. Good for calls, and you may be squinting by mid-afternoon.
Worst: back to the window. The screen reflects the window all day and on video calls you are a dark shape against a bright rectangle. This is the most common arrangement in home offices and the one to change first.
Monitor height
The top of the screen should be at or slightly below eye level, and the screen tilted back about 10 to 20 degrees.
Most monitors on their own stands sit too low, which is why people crane forward. A monitor arm or a stand is a small fix for a daily problem, and a stack of the books already on your desk works perfectly well as a test before you buy anything.
For laptops: a laptop cannot have both the screen and the keyboard at the right height. If you work on one for more than a couple of hours a day, raise the laptop and use a separate keyboard. There is no arrangement of a bare laptop on a desk that is not a compromise.
Shelving above the desk
18 to 24 inches above the desk surface, under 18 and you cannot fit a monitor or your head underneath, over 24 and you cannot reach it seated.
Depth 8 to 10 inches. Check the sightline: at 10 inches deep and 18 inches up, you will clip it leaning back.
Keep the shelf depth different from the desk depth, or the shelf reads as a second desktop stacked above the first. See the depth guide.
The surface material, since you touch it all day
Your forearms rest on a desk for hours. A film-finished surface, lacquer or polyurethane, feels like plastic and gets slightly tacky under warm skin.
An oiled timber surface feels like wood, and it has the practical advantage that the wear patch that inevitably develops where your wrists sit can be re-oiled in twenty minutes rather than requiring the whole top to be refinished. More on that in wood finishes explained.
A live edge desk works well here for a non-obvious reason: the organic front edge is more comfortable against forearms than a hard square edge, and there is no sharp corner at the point where your wrist rests.
Cable management
A tangle of cables under a desk is the reason people never move the desk and never clean under it.
A tray or channel under the rear edge, a power strip mounted to the underside rather than lying on the floor, and cables bundled from the strip. Twenty minutes once, and the floor underneath becomes usable space again.
Storage
Keep the desktop for what you use daily and put everything else elsewhere. A desk with drawers is convenient and costs knee clearance; a desk without drawers plus a small unit beside it usually works better.
Whatever the arrangement, leave one clear span of at least 12 inches beside the keyboard. Without it, papers go on top of the keyboard.
The checklist
- Elbows at 90 degrees, forearms level: set the desk height to that.
- Feet flat on the floor or on a footrest.
- Screen an arm's length away, top at eye level.
- Window to the side.
- 24 inches of clear knee height.
- One clear span of desk to actually work on.
See the desks, cut to your height, or the office pieces.
Common questions
How high should a desk be?
28 to 30 inches, adjusted to you. As a rough guide by height: under 5 foot 4 wants 26 to 28 inches, 5 foot 4 to 5 foot 10 wants 28 to 29, and over 5 foot 10 wants 30 to 31.
How deep should a desk be?
24 to 30 inches. 24 inches is the minimum for a single monitor and it is tight with a deep stand. 30 inches takes a monitor plus space to write in front of the keyboard.
How far away should a monitor be?
About an arm's length, roughly 20 to 30 inches from your eyes. That distance is what sets the depth the desk needs.
From the Rootelier range
Curved Contemporary Desk and Wave Contemporary Desk, or see all desks. Every piece is made to order, so sizes can be adjusted to the room.