Extending Your Reach

Talented designers know how to plan a utilitarian 36" to 48" kitchen desk in their residential designs that houses the phone, family stationery and bulletin board. This type of "message center" adds organizational value to a functional kitchen space.

Such a center should never be simply expanded when the client requests a home-based office area. Rather, it should be tailored to the client's specific needs.
When creating an environment for a client who will spend the majority of his or her work time in this office, kitchen designers should turn to commercial interior specialists, the office furniture industry and ergonomic specialists for planning guidelines and equipment specification suggestions.

To begin learning about home office design, kitchen designers should visit office furniture stores to better understand available office furniture, table-type desk arrangements, file cabinet sizing options and available seating. Simply modifying kitchen cabinets – or suggesting pulling over a breakfast nook chair – may be just too limiting when creating a regularly used home office.

After becoming familiar with cabinet/furniture sizing and chair design, kitchen specialists must learn about equipment specifications. If a home-based office will house multiple employees, "commercial-grade" equipment (that is, heavy-duty printers, copiers, plotters, scanners and the like) will probably be required. But, rather than employ commercial products, many home-based offices rely on equipment designed for home use. And, just as the appliances in a kitchen are identified early in the planning process, the equipment specifications come first for home office design.

A key question to ask the client is if wireless technology will be used. This technology allows you to separate copying, faxing, scanning and printing equipment from the computer. An office may be built around a collection of fax, copier and photo-printer machines already in use. Or, the client may opt to start fresh.

Before listing what new equipment must be housed, an inventory of the existing equipment should be taken. Popular today are combination printer/scan/copy/fax machines. All too often, in well-organized offices, such equipment is built into a drawer or behind a door on a pull-out shelf. These pieces of equipment range in size: 17" to 22" wide, 15" to 24" deep and 15" to 26" high. Some of these sizes may not easily fit in normal desk units or modified kitchen cabinets.

In addition to the actual size of the apparatus, clear space around it must be planned. The designer needs to know how paper is loaded and retrieved, where a paper jam is cleared, and how paper exits the copy function of the machine.

To summarize, when considering the client's office equipment, the following questions need to be asked:
---What pieces of equipment will be used? Are they individual or combination units?

---Are there equipment additions planned? Perhaps a design professional is contemplating adding an oversized plotter to print 18"x24" paper. Where is it going to go?

---How and where are all of the electrical supply lines going to come into the office, and what is the relationship between all of the equipment? An excellent source for cord management equipment and countertop grommets is Hafele America (www.hafeleonline.com). Note the previous comment about wireless technology.

---How is paper fed into the equipment? For many systems, the paper is fed at the rear top section perpendicular to the machine, requiring clear air space above. For others, the paper is fed left or right, requiring much less space above the equipment.

---How many sizes of paper will the office use? Where will it be stored? How much space in front of or to the side of the equipment must be clear to allow printed documents to be retrieved?

---How is a jam cleared from the machinery? Almost all of these devices use a roller system to feed the paper that must be easily accessible from the back to clear a jam. Trying to clear a jam from the front of any of this equipment will result in damaged wheels or gears.

Much like visiting appliance Web sites, designers can familiarize themselves with the equipment on the market for home-based offices by visiting Brother
(www.brother.com), Canon (www.canon.com), Dell (www.dell.com), Epson (www.epson.com), Gateway (www.gateway.com), Hewlett Packard (www.hp.com), IBM (www.ibm.com), Lexmark (www.lexmark.com) and Minolta (konicaminolta.com). Or, just visit Staples, Office Depot or other such retailers to visually inspect and size equipment.