Fun workspace features like slides and outlandishly creative office design schemes get a lot of attention, but ultimately, the individual workspaces where employees carry out most of their daily tasks are more germane to both happiness and productivity. Should they be private, or prioritize openness and collaboration? Should they be serious, or a little quirky and fun? These 12 modern workspaces show how various companies and designers have answered those questions, and most of the time, the solutions are somewhere in between – with a heavy emphasis on adaptability and choice.

Treehouse 2 by Dymitr Malcew

Contained within your own little acoustically insulated pod, you could stretch out and get comfortable, have a phone conversation, huddle together with another employee, wheel yourself into a private corner of the office or come together with multiple other units to form a little ‘village.’ The ‘Treehouse’ and ‘Treehouse 2’ structures by architect Dymitr Malcew are somewhere in between architecture and furniture, finding middle ground between fully enclosed offices and the kind of open-plan spaces that workers tend to find distracting and uncomfortable.

Snaking Interactive Desk by Teamlab for Pixiv

A single desk snakes around a vividly colored office space for a full 820 feet, providing all sorts of nooks and crannies for workers to choose from. Designed by Teamlab for Pixiv, a Japanese online community for artists, the wooden table is a single continuous loop with a ‘bridge’ you walk under to get inside. Cutouts in the surface make way for cables and chargers as well as a few semi-enclosed working areas.

Zones by Pearsonlloyd

From intensive individual work sessions to collaborations to meetings to phone calls, an office should have a variety of ‘zones’ offering comfortable spaces for various functions. The ‘Zones’ collection by London-based designers PearsonLloyd, created for Teknion, takes all of these needs into account.

“Zones includes a variety of furniture components that can be combined with other to create an all-inclusive office furniture solution,” say the designers. “The collection is shaped around the idea of Informal Productivity – an alternative to the traditional office, designed to give users choice and to create work environments that encourage collaborative and private settings… the emotional, humanistic aspect is fundamental to Zones as the collection supports modern office tasks in a manner that recognizes the human craving for familiarity, warmth, comfort and empowerment.”

Suspended Workspace by Studio Frank Havermans

It may look like a carnival ride, but this hovering contraption by Studio Frank Havermans is actually a desk designed for the head office at Akzonobel, a paint and coating company in Amsterdam. The designers took the color scheme from the new McLaren F1 car MCL33. It’s unclear whether the desk, which was created as part of an exhibition called ‘Common Ground,’ will be in regular use by people in the office, but it’s probably a lot more fun than the average workspace in the building.

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The typical desk design has remained the same for centuries, but we need these surfaces to do more – like incorporate our gadgets, offer privacy in loud offices, fit into our homes, fold up to take on the go or offer proper space for our cat overlords. Maybe even all of these things at once.  These designs are more than just a flat slab on legs, adapting to 21st century standards in all sorts of different ways.

Turia Table by Maxime Mellot Incorporates Nature

“Can we admire nature and put it in a cage?” says Maxime Mellot of his own design, this curious desk inspired by a park in the city of Valencia, Spain. “Turia participates in the debate, and forces the user to divert his attention, from his own person to live animals, requiring care and benevolence. In a society focused on performance and permanent connection to the internet, pure moments of privacy become rare and precious. But how can furniture invite us to take a break, drink a tea or have a snack and help us to enjoy this specific disconnected moment? My project tends to merge the universe of nature and relaxation, by combining iconic items such as bird cage and fish tank in an interactive way.”

Koloro-Desk by Torafu Architects

The interior of the Koloro-desk by Torafu Architects is like a cheerful miniature house with its very own operable windows, so you can lean inside to read, work, sketch or nap and feel a sense of disconnection from the world just outside its little walls. The two flip-out windows on either side offer shelves for drinks and other objects, and there’s even a skylight.

Oxymoron Desk by Anna Lotova

Shove stationery, pens and other item between the two little cushions under the surface of Anna Lotova’s Oxymoron Desk. The name comes from the unlikely pairing of materials. The cushion sandwich even lets you slide a piece of plywood inside to create a side table.

“We have to change our behavior, plan and think of work with a different mindset: no matter where an office is situated, it has to have a space it can call its own, identifiable, alterable, on a human scale, with its own history and objects, an enjoyable environment,” says Lotova.

CATable by Hao Ruan

Do you have a persistent feline companion who gets a little jealous of your computer or books when you’re working? This clever table by Hao Ruan of LYCS Architecture doubles as cat furniture, with the underside full of comfy curving hollows and tunnels for your cat friend to hide in.

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Open-plan offices with simplified furniture may look nice and minimalist, but they typically lack built-in storage and organization, making it hard to wrangle all the little things you need to use each day. That calls for some creative solutions that won’t make a cluttered situation even worse. These modern desk organizers are up to the task, and they look good, too.

3D Desk Organizer by Block

The shaped wire that makes up the Sketch Desk Tidy by Block mimics the look of a drawing that’s been translated into a 3D form suggestive of a building. The powder-coated steel cage in blue or black rests upon a wooden base to hold pens and other small office items.

5 Brilliant Ideas from RIT’s Metaproject for Poppin

Poppin, a New York-based shop for modern office products, teamed up with students from the Rochester Institute of Technology for this edition of ‘Metaproject’ to deliver a series of economical, reproducible yet aesthetically pleasing and highly functional accessories. The results solve a lot of storage problems commonly seen in workspaces, especially those that have switched to a minimalist open-plan design scheme that leaves no room for drawers, hooks and cabinets. The creations include the High-Rise Hanging Family, modular organizers that fit over a felt divider; Branch Holder for your keys, bags and headphones; The Booster Desk so you can stand up when you feel like it; the Munch Mat Takeout Bag so you don’t make a mess with your lunch, and the Task Chair Overhanger for purses, scarves and jackets.

Cliff Riser with Built-In Storage

This simple steel riser is more than just a way to elevate your monitor – it has two drawers built into the side to hold small items like tape dispensers and staplers or personal effects. The Cliff by Heckler Design comes in six colors and is just the right size to be useful without taking up too much desk space.

Memory City USB Station

Do you have trouble keeping track of a bunch of different external storage devices like USB thumb drives? Instead of tossing them all in a drawer, keep them handy and visible with the Memory City USB Station. This plastic diorama of train stations scenery includes slots for thumb drives and flash cards, which then tower over the scene like skyscrapers.

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Ready or not, it’s time to stand up when this kinetic desk starts to rise on its own, ensuring that you don’t spend too much time in an unhealthy seated position as you work. Studies have shown that parking ourselves in chairs for eight hours or more per day can lead to organ damage, foggy brain, a strained neck, muscle degeneration and other negative effects. Experts recommend alternating between sitting and standing – and now there’s a high-tech desk that will help you do just that.

The Stir Kinetic Desk gently raises and lowers itself at pre-set intervals, to custom heights of your choice. A built-in touch screen on the desk surface enables you to check your daily stats, telling you how long you’ve spent in each position and when your next adjustment should be.

You just double-tap the home screen to move the desk to its next position when desired, using a slider to create your desk height presets. A function called ‘Whisperbreath’ creates a gentle one-inch rise and fall of the desk surface to signal you that it’s time to stand up so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing.

The creator calls it a “non-wearable wearable,” i.e. a fitness-tracking gadget that works in a similar way to smart watches and Fitbits. You can also synch other fitness tech to track how many calories you burn while standing. The cost of “the world’s most advanced desk” clocks in at $2,990.

When it comes to aesthetics, offices tend to get the short end of the stick. They often seem like an afterthought, filled with drab, purely utilitarian furniture that doesn’t exactly inspire creative thinking. These 12 modern, clever and sometimes wacky office interiors and desk designs are the antithesis of boring corporate cubicles, serving as stimulating backdrops perfect for brainstorming sessions.

Space-Saving Home Office Desk & Storage

When you need plenty of organization but are short on space, a combination desk/shelving system with a small footprint is ideal. Consisting of a single strip of curved wood that serves as a desk, bookshelf and modern art piece, this unusual design by MisoSoup is sleek, multifunctional and perfect for apartments, condos and dorms.

Completely Cardboard Office Interior

Cardboard may not seem like the ideal choice of material with which to build an entire office space, but it has been proven surprisingly strong and aesthetically pleasing at the innovative offices of Amsterdam advertising firm Nothing Agency. From each office nook to the coffee table in the waiting area, nearly every element in the building is constructed from this inexpensive material, which also serves as a canvas upon which to sketch creative ideas.

All-in-One Inverted Cubicle

There are three ways in which we work, relax and interact in an office environment: social/interactive, functional/focused and casual/private. That’s the idea that designers o4i used to create this thoughtful all-in-one desk concept, providing a standing area at which to present ideas and communicate with others, a desk at which to sit and work, and a relaxing lounging space in which to dream up new ideas.

Matte Black Vintage to Modern Office Makeover

This office full of upcycled vintage furniture proves that when in doubt, spray painting a less than beautiful item black can work wonders. Flea market and garage sale finds that would have looked like a jumble of mismatched objects are suddenly modern and unified, especially when juxtaposed with the white of the room’s floors, walls and ceiling.

DIY Modular Custom Offices

If you buy a home without the necessary space to house an office, adding a custom modular extension can be the perfect solution – especially when it’s easy enough to DIY. This outdoor ‘office shed’, designed by Stephen Meir, consists of a modular system of parts that can be configured to create a modern office space in a variety of shapes according to your needs.

Liquid-Cooled Computer & Desk Combo

For the tech geek that loves to disassemble electronics just to gaze lovingly at their inner workings, this combined computer-and-desk designed and built by Popular Mechanics might just be the ultimate in office furniture. Each part is illuminated by LED lights and surrounded by clear laser-cut acrylic, cooled by fans and liquid.

Creative Custom Steampunk Office

Colorful and undeniably unique, this custom steampunk-inspired office space created for Three Rings certainly doesn’t skimp on intricate artistic details but was surprisingly inexpensive to bring to life. Equipped with the requisite gears and cephalopods, this office even has a video game area with a gigantic squid-shaped couch boasting 20-foot-long tentacles.

Ultramodern Desk Chair Design Set

When designers set out to create ultra-minimalist furniture, they must come up with creative ways in which to balance form and function. This Omega desk-and-chair set by Atomare is carefully engineered for comfort, visual appeal and ease of use, with convenient storage space below the desk’s surface that eliminates the need for drawers.

Cars Converted to Luxurious Desks

While the usefulness of working headlights, hazard lights and a horn is debatable, these custom car desks created from Mini Coopers are a car enthusiast’s dream. Buyers can choose between leather, wood, metal or colored vinyl for the desktop and even the car itself can be painted to match the space it’s intended for. And, while they aren’t cheap, these made-on-demand desks have a smaller price tag than one would expect, clocking in under $5,000.

Disney Store’s Playful Headquarters

With giant honeycombs that act as storage and room dividers and a meeting space with a building-block wall that can be disassembled and turned into seating, this is a fun and colorful office space fit for a children’s toy company. Designed by Clive Wilkinson, the former warehouse now acts as the vast, playful headquarters of the Disney Store.

Modern Portable Rolltop Desk

Steel and pale-colored wood combine to give the rolltop desk a modern makeover, with a compact curvilinear shape and wheels for portability. Designed by Mebelux, this lightweight desk is perfect for small office spaces with a modern aesthetic, closing to hide clutter and easily rolling into the corner when necessary.

Sleek Organizing Desk for the Perpetually Messy

Can you get away with being messy, yet somehow organized at the same time? This clever desk design allows a sort of controlled chaos with nooks and crannies in which to store items that would otherwise be scattered across the desktop or shoved into drawers.