by Rose McClement

While working through our “Office & Workspace” Pinterest board recently, trying to pick my three favourite images for our previous Pinterest Pick post, I kept circling back to the images of one of our own projects. Truth be told, it really was my favourite workspace on that whole Pinterest board, one that I would be more than happy to set up in my own home.

That inspired me to feature one of Design Monarchy‘s own workspaces – one that we designed for a residence in East London. The home office we put together for project Riverside Place was a super cool, quirky and fun-filled workspace.

To give you a glimpse of the overall style for the look and feel for this project, the brief was for Scandi-inspired interior, splashed with strong trendy colours, some floral patterns, and hints of glamour.

The colour scheme that runs through the house is tones of aqua, yellow, coral, soft grey and off-white. Since this office space was relatively small, we had to be careful not to overwhelm it with too much colour. Instead of plain off-white walls, we introduced a trendy small black and white polka dot wallpaper as one of the main features.

Want to know what the best part of a project is for me (almost every time) – is the phase formally known as “source, select and specify”. That generally comes once the brief has been settled and some of the R&D has been ticked off.  We get to run around doing the shopping for the project. It generally starts with fabrics, furniture and lastly the decorative elements. More often than not, this process includes the client as was the case with this project.

The client has a very colourful personality and as such, it had to be revealed in this office, despite the small space. The advantage that we, as an interior design company, have is that we can do all the necessary space planning ahead of time, using our 3D programs (Marica is such an ace at this). Once the furniture layout has been done on plan, we know exactly what the size of each piece of furniture has to be – it alleviates all the guesswork, helping us to maximize the space without cluttering. Armed with that information we found the perfect Scandi-styled desk at @Home Living, which we combined with two metal freestanding drawer pedestals in aqua and a yellow Eames replica desk chair. Yummy!

Another feature in the room was the custom made wall-mounted box shelves. We had the inside back of each cubicle painted in a different colour. It’s such a fun element that adds depth to a plain wooden finish.

Last but not least, a vintage chest of drawers / filing cabinet which the client picked up at a vintage shop in East London. To bring it into this decade we had it painted in an Ombre effect – in different tones of yellow.  It was quite a hair-raising task finding those tones of yellow for each drawer! However, I’m sure you will agree it worked really well!

Well, there you have it, a bit of an in-depth look at one of our favourite workspace creations.  I hope you enjoy it as much as Marica and I (and naturally our clients) do.

If you feel like it, why not tell us what image you have in your mind-eye for your own workspace? Have you achieved it yet or is it a work in progress?

Cheers for now.

P.S. Want to see some more snaps from this wonderful project? Be sure to check it out on our website portfolio page: here. 

Photography: Francois Oberholster (for Home Magazine)