Give some thought to the impression your office furniture makes on clients. A firm of accountants needs different styles of cubicle furniture from an ad agency; a call center shouldn’t have the same kind of cubicle furniture as a law firm! The impression you make depends largely on what your clients need from you. A design firm wants its cubicle furniture to look adventurous and creative; an accounting firm needs cubicle furniture that helps it look solid and dependable.

You should also be mindful if the style of cubicle furniture you’re selecting is timeless, or is bound to go out of style in the next few years. Sure, your cubicle furniture looks great now – but in five years, will the new employees be as squeamish in their office furniture as they would be wearing 1970s-era leisure suits?

Ergonomics: Form or Comfort? Ergonomic cubicle furniture and cubicle accessories – chairs, keyboards drawers, monitor stands and mounts – help increase productivity and employee morale. Ergonomic chairs allow employees to adjust their armrests and other chair parts;  the height of their keyboards and work surfaces should be adjustable as well.

Ergonomics can be less of a priority if your employees spend most of their working day out in the field; but if they spend most of their day seated at the same cubicle, then do invest in ergonomic cubicle furniture, it’s an investment that pays off in spades over time.

Future-proofing – static or expandable? Ask yourself how easy it would be to expand the office layout with the cubicle furniture you have in mind. If your enterprise is the kind that would experience workforce fluctuations or constant technology upgrades, then you’ll need cubicle furniture that can accommodate constant change.

Will your employees be able to move their desks and other cubicle furniture around themselves? Or will you need professional help to dismantle and rebuild cubicle furniture to any future specifications?

Toughness: Disposable or Durable? You want cubicle furniture that’s worth the money you pay for it, and the best way to ensure the best bang for your buck is to check if the cubicle furniture under consideration meets ANSI-BIFMA performance standards.

The Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturer’s Association releases ANSI/BIFMA Safety and Performance Standards every five years, using guidelines set by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). These standards can tell you how well your cubicle furniture performs where safety, durability, and structural adequacy are concerned.

You can also ensure great value on your cubicle furniture by only sourcing office furniture that comes with a warranty or promise of after-sales service. Even used cubicle furniture these days (from select furniture dealers) come with these guarantees!

I don’t know about you, but when the first time I tried to pimp my cubicle, I worked with a really low budget – and cheap clods like me began with action figures. Dollies for men. Surely you can’t be a sissy if your office cubicle action figures come from the hit show Futurama could you?

ThinkGeek sells three sets of Futurama action figures, including the star-crossed duo of Leela and Zapp Brannigan (pictured above – with the awesome addition of Richard Nixon’s head in a jar!).

Moving up the budget scale, indulge your Formula One fantasies by buying a RaceChair – an actual seat from a real-live sports car, lovingly transformed into a static office chair. How’s that for a comedown? One moment, you’re a critical collaborator on Lewis Hamilton’s Formula One team, the next, you’re warming a midlevel manager’s expanding backside.

RaceChairs cost as low as $2,000, but may go for over $11,000, in the case of a seat stripped from a Lamborghini LP640 Murcielago.

More pimped-out cubicles after the jump.

How about an accessory that makes a statement? The kind of statement that tells Chrissie from accounting that she’s not welcome to visit for another round of mouthing off about her ex-husband? The CubeGuard is meant to keep visitors out and help you stay productive – but surely there’s a less passive-aggressive way to deliver the message?

“But Mike,” I hear you say, “why settle for cheap toys when you can go all the way?” Like Jared Nielsen? The guy who transformed his cubicle into a wood-paneled, curlicued horror just for the heck of it? His justification goes as follows:

In an era of socialized information technology, there is the opportunity to re-capitalize the space and demonstrate that originality trumps equality, that shoving capitalists into socialist boxes only create unhappy socialists, and red mahogany generally kicks ass...

You must admit, that is one wide capitalist shit-eating grin.

I’ll conclude with this pimped cubicle that kicks solid ass – a camouflaged cubicle that shows those evil terrorists what’s what, while still getting that TPS report done on time.

Working with a small office design forces you to zero in on your needs, fast. Do you expect frequent client visits? Then you’ll need furniture that leaves a good impression. No patchy second-hand furniture, or worse, wildly inappropriate furnishing choices (one small travel agency I visited this week had, I kid you not, a bed).

Is the industry you’re working in a stable one? You might think about leasing furniture to stock your small office. On the other hand, choosing to buy your furniture outright may keep your budget low, and compel you to buy only the stuff you really need.

Tough questions like these can help you decide what furniture you need to be productive in your small office. Some things will always stay constant: a decent desk; a comfortable chair; a telephone; a PC.

If you’re working from home, your work and personal facilities should be separate, or as separate as possible. Have a separate phone line for work, so you don’t miss important calls from clients if your kid is on the line.

Think of your power consumption – can your small office location cope with the extra wattage you’ll need to consume for your enterprise? Do you have enough power outlets to cope with a PC, desk light, printer, scanner, and fax machine all sucking up juice at the same time?

Finally, you should add a light touch to your small office design – a painting in the right place, or a photo frame of your husband and kids can lighten the mood in your small office. Ransack your personal wants and needs to create an office that’s not just a pleasure to work in, but also a place you want to visit again and again. The alternative is just too horrible to contemplate!

Take this example from WorkSquared – this video shows a timed cubicle installation session, transforming a bare space into a six-cubicle set in just over an hour. You’ve got to see it to believe it – office cubicle installation in a flash, giving you a complete office in the time it takes to finish your lunch!

Of course, the video leaves out the hard work done before the partitions are locked in place. The cubicle provider needs to know the dimensions of the work area, the type of cubicles that need to be installed, the type of electronics that will be used (AO2 cubicles accommodate cabling, but these need to be determined beforehand).

Our guys got this down pat, too – cubicle installation services and more. Ring us up if you want this kind of speedy magic pulled off in your workspace.

Fortunately, there are ways around cookie-cutter office design. Like flowers growing from cracks in the pavement, your own design sensibility can be brought to bear onto even the most boring workplace. Just don’t be afraid to project your own style onto your office, and you’re good to go!

Look through these examples, and take some inspiration to work.

Image © Herman Miller, Cubicles.com

Herman Miller Celle Chair. A classic that adds both comfort and class to any office space, the Celle Chair from industry leader Herman Miller offers great value in an adjustable ergonomic mesh chair.

The Celle’s Cellular Suspension mesh technology provides comfortable seating with the added bonus of looking extremely sharp. Cellular Suspension moves with you – its loops and cells flex individually to give you the best possible support, however you move.

Get your Herman Miller Celle Chair from Cubicles.com’s seating page, where the Celle and many other cutting-edge seat designs are just waiting for you to take one of ‘em home.

Image © Aissa Logerot

Side Bookcase. A side-standing bookshelf? Yes, says designer Aissa Logerot – having one’s books on the side frees the walls for pictures, yet protects books from spills and stains.

This shelf, crafted out of plain wood planks, is an ideal addition to any modern office. You can use it as a coffee table, media center, or as a room divider; multiple functions that can only add charm to one’s office design.

To see two more smashing designs, click “read more”.

Image © Burak Kaynak

Share/Trashcan. Turkish designer Burak Kaynak conceptualized a trash can that seamlessly fits into the social media landscape: a smart step-on trash that advertises the number of steps made on the foot pedal, reflected on the can’s surface via LED counter.

Kaynak doesn’t say whether the can tweets each step to the Twitterverse via Wi-Fi, but it’s the next logical step. If a matrimonial bed can tweet the newlyweds’ relations to the world, why can’t a trash can do the same with its own business?

Image © Ting London

Floor tiles made from vintage leather belts. If you have the dosh for this, these floor tiles made from recycled leather belts are just the thing to add the right note of warmth to your office design. Not that leather flooring itself is familiar, but the feel of aged leather underfoot, and seeing leather belts tiled across the floor, ought to be a treat to anybody walking into your office space.

Of course it doesn’t come cheap – $70 buys you one square foot of leather-belt floor tiles, which you can source from London leather provider Ting London.

The Wall Street Journal reports that office cubicles have now become prime real estate in the recession. Companies are taking different tacks. Some are creating open floor plans and removing cubicles from their office spaces. Employees are now given rotating or random workspaces, instead of being assigned an office cubicle of their own. Other employees are given more opportunity to telecommute.

Manufacturers are following suit – new workstations designed by design group HOK now have an average area of 48 square feet, down 30% from five years back. Other companies “are reducing per-employee office space by as much as 50%, and their total footprint by as much as 25%,” the article reports.

One former office cubicle rat – now a telecommuting writer working from her own home – remembers the old days with mixed feelings. Says True/Slant’s Caitlin Kelly:

That’s one good thing about working alone at home. Right now, the only sound I hear — loud and clear — is my neighbor’s laughter and phone conversation. I’m not sure, short of a cabin in the woods, you can escape noise or other people and get your work done.

I can’t agree with you more, Miz Kelly. Although I’d add that some of these companies are plainly misled – why cut down on cubicle space and call that savings, when they can just buy remanufactured cubicles at a much lower price and keep their office cubicle inhabitants happy with a little more real estate? Just a suggestion.

Furniture that can be easily moved around is key. Ease of disassembly is another attractive characteristic for many FM’s. And it’s worth noting that this advantage is not limited to chairs, desks, storage, and the like.

“Modular interior construction is finally beginning to realize its potential,” observes Mark Paul, national sales manager for OM Workspace based in Naperville, IL. “Many buildings use movable walls, raised floors, sound masking systems, and indirect lighting fixtures to [facilitate easily reconfigured space.]”facilities management furniture trends

Wait, isn’t modular furniture expensive? Not anymore; one side-effect of the recession is a glut in used office furniture, and a corresponding surfeit of remanufactured office furniture that’s practically indistinguishable from brand new, but comes at a lower cost.

This provides an advantage for the facility manager with one eye to the future, and another on his bottom line.

Modular office furniture is not only adequately represented in remanufactured furniture catalogs (such as Cubicles.com’s extensive inventory of remanufactured furniture by Herman Miller – watch out, it’s in PDF). Modular office furniture’s increasing versatility and interchangeability offers the following advantages highly sought after by facility managers:

Adaptability: such furniture can be reconfigured to serve a variety of job types. They can be adapted to current usage, or put away when downsizing or restructuring occurs.

Compatibility: remanufactured office furniture catalogs allow facility managers to match newly-purchased furniture to existing product lines – minimizing the mismatch that often comes when the manager has to wait long periods before purchasing new furniture.

Customization: remanufactured office furniture allows a high degree of customization when called for. Call center operators and vice presidents have very different needs – a facility manager ought to be able to provide for the needs of both.

Mona Hoffman, vice president of marketing at Kimball Office in Jasper, IN, notes the way the wind is blowing for facility managers. “There is a need for multipurpose products that easily adapt to changing footprints and flex with the flow of people and projects,” Hoffman reports.

These surprising findings were revealed through a randomized trial published in Health Environments Research and Design Journal. The Space and Interaction Trial tested a new office interior design, which had both patient and physician facing a computer screen at a semi-circular desk. The study randomly tested 63 pairs of patients and doctors.

Participating physicians felt that they were able to share more information, while patients felt they had better access to information.

“This study supports the notion that the space in which people meet can influence how they work together,” said Dr. Victor Montori, one of the study’s principal authors.

The study was a result of collaboration between the Mayo Clinic and the office furniture company Steelcase.

This $2.7 million property in the heart of Greenwich Village is centrally located and has been home to some of New York’s foremost personalities, among them Cary Grant and John Barrymore.

The size limitations are quite daunting – 9.5 feet by 42 feet. Sorry, baby grand. Goodbye, king-size bed. And I guess your dreams of having a penthouse-level ballroom will have to go.

But the owner, Stephen Balsamo, seems to have made the most out of the townhouse’s slim margin of space. The New York Post reports –

In the kitchen, a custom stove has all four burners in a single row, rather than the usual two-by-two arrangement. The three floors are all open, but the balconies overlooking the garden were extended, adding depth to make up for lack of width. [..]

Visitors to the home expect to find it dark and claustrophobic, but as a result of the sweeping windows in the back, “every floor has amazing light,” Nicholas said.

But who’s got furniture that can fit in these tight situations? Enter Swedish manufacturer (and furnisher of divorced men’s apartments) IKEA – whoever snaps up this Greenwich Village steal will also score free design advice and $10,000 in IKEA furniture.

Janice Simonsen, IKEA design expert and spokesperson, says “We’re so in love with small spaces that we’re putting an offer on the table… albeit a skinny table.”

LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” – its certifications are overseen by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a non-profit organization that is now the country’s numero uno watchdog for green and sustainable buildings.

But apparently a “gap between design and construction” is becoming apparent, according to the New York Times’ Mireya Navarro:

The [USGBC] council’s own research suggests that a quarter of the new buildings that have been certified do not save as much energy as their designs predicted and that most do not track energy consumption once in use. And the program has been under attack from architects, engineers and energy experts who argue that because building performance is not tracked, the certification may be falling short in reducing emissions tied to global warming.

[…] “The plaque should be installed with removable screws,” said Henry Gifford, an energy consultant in New York City. “Once the plaque is glued on, there’s no incentive to do better.”

The problem is that efficient building materials and techniques don’t necessarily translate to more efficient buildings in the long run.

See, a LEED certification for new green buildings will confirm that a building was designed and constructed using green methods… but as the current system stands, LEED doesn’t look at how the building is run afterwards. In fact, many LEED-certified buildings are known to be horribly inefficient once the ribbon has been cut.

A few activists have been crying “I told you so”; LEED-certified buildings are vulnerable to criticism that their new certifications don’t exactly guarantee continuing green performance (see this article: The Four Sins of LEEDwashing)

The USGBC has heard this before, and may act on it soon – the council may change the rules to permit revocation of one’s LEED certification if certain standards aren’t met. Decertification can be a real possibility for underperforming LEED-certified buildings.

LEED-certified buildings may also be obliged to provide information on how the building is run. Energy-use data may be collected from every rated building, and the data may be made public.

USGBC top brass plans to meet with builders, developers, and owners all across the US, hoping to come to a consensus on the needed LEED changes.