An Ode to the Desk: Musings of the At Home Workspace

Words by Luke Rees

We find ourselves in a strange time, a time when cafés, libraries, galleries and parks are closed. A time when some of us cannot see our families, and some of us cannot leave our houses. A vast proportion of us have had to adapt our homes to become places of work and, as a result, home desks have become something of a necessity. If we do not have one, we might find ourselves making them from dining tables, coffee tables, decorating tables, and odd bits of wood and trestles. Whatever shape our desks take, no two look the same. They are each a reflection of the people that own them.

Our personalities are projected onto the desks that we occupy. They could be minimalist, cubist, cluttered or something else. But it is interesting that a desk with definitive features can take on a completely different aesthetic if it is decorated in a certain way. A simple Scandinavian desk covered with piles of books, empty coffee mugs, and pages of notes quickly loses its minimalist aesthetic. Albert Einstein’s desk, famously messy, reflected his tangential thinking. Sigmund Freud’s, on the other hand, shows his fascination with antique African sculptures. Whatever our desks are made out of, and whatever design school they descend from, they inevitably reflect the ways in which we work and the items that we use on a day-to-day basis.

Desks are so much more than the materials that form their frames, and even the items that we furnish them with. They offer us safe spaces in which we can document moments of time in diaries, journals and blogs. It is a constant challenge for historians to give objective accounts of history due to limited evidence captured at the time. They tend to omit some detail, or depend too heavily on biased sources, for example. But diaries are generally regarded to hold great historic value. Diaries are unique sources because they are often written in the solitude of a desk-space. There is no church authority, or government official, or jealous lover, peering over our shoulders as we write at our desks and into our diaries, and so we are able to record our lives and the world that we live in as we really perceive them.

For some of us, our desks might be one of the few places where we can contact our loved ones. For now, Zoom and FaceTime must suffice to replace picnics, time with grandchildren, intimacy. While we set up to call the people dear to us, we forget about the aesthetics of our desks and they become a mere surface on which to put our laptops. In these instances, function outweighs form a thousand times over and our desks help to remind us of the things that hold real meaning.

The desk-spaces that we no doubt find ourselves increasingly resigned to may be antique roll-tops or garden bistro tables. Yet they are all excellent places in which we can learn, reflect, journal or engage with loved ones.