Working from home is the new normal for millions of Americans. In the past, you may have occasionally worked from home — which typically involved balancing a laptop on your knee or creating some space on your kitchen countertop. But now that you’re working from home on a regular basis, neither the “knee thing” nor working next to your blender is a viable option.

However, creating an effective (and comfortable) work-from-home office space includes various components. Where should the office be? What should it include? How can you stay organized? What else do you need to know?

We rounded up a variety of interior designers, organizers and other experts, along with some of the coolest WFH items, to create the ultimate WFH office guide.

Selecting the Right Location

If you don’t already have a home office, your first dilemma is how to stop being a nomad in your own home. According to Susie Hayman, productivity consultant and owner of InYourBizness, and president of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO), creating a permanent workspace is important. “Having a designated office space is key to being productive, as it reduces distractions, increases your ability to focus, and provides a clear delineation between personal/professional or work/play lives,” she says. “When I’m in my office, that’s when I work; when I’m in the kitchen, that’s when I eat/cook.”

However, if you don’t have the luxury of a separate space, your options are limited. “I always advise against setting up work in the bedroom,” Hayman says. “If need be, a specified area of a family/living space could be an alternate solution, or a corner or area of the living space would work, as long as it is comfortable.”

To give you some ideas, Lexington Homes and Optima Signature in Chicago provided the photos above as examples of how the niches in some of their apartments and townhouses are being used for dedicated office space.

Read the full feature at MultiBrief

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Some days it seems like there are more pigeons than people in The Loop.

With so many office workers pounding keyboards at home these days, the Optima Signature tower in Streeterville is left with four offices sans purpose. Its solution is to offer those offices to students, instead.

For a price between $1,800 and $2,400 a month, parents can rent the spaces for their children in a 57-story skyscraper to do remote schooling and studying. Each sweet suite has between five and seven spread out work stations, so presumably you’d get together with a bunch of like-minded parents and split the cost. Unless you’re the Brady Bunch, in which case, go nuts.

The office suites are on the second and seventh floors of the tower at 220 East Illinois Street. Students share gigabit internet, mini-fridges, trash and housekeeping service, and all the HVAC they can breathe. They also have access to some of the mostly-residential building’s amenities, like outdoor lounge spaces.

Read the full feature at Chicago Architecture

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Optima, Inc. Senior Vice President Mark Segal joins John Williams to describe the learning pods his company is providing to e-learning students in high rise Optima Signature residential buildings.

Click here to listen to the interview on WGN

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For Mark Segal, Senior Vice President at Glencoe, Ill.-based Optima, which operates luxury high-rise apartment buildings in Chicago and Arizona, taking a white-glove approach has been a labor-intensive, but effective, way of getting packages to residents’ doors. Staffers drop packages outside individual doors on a daily basis.

First, team members, wearing masks and gloves, place the package outside of the apartment home, Segal says. “We [later] do a sweep through the hallways of the community, and if the package isn’t picked up as of a certain time of day by the resident and brought into their home, we return [it to] our storage system.” It’s both a service and an amenity, he adds.

Segal says the system keeps residents from congregating around crowded locker rooms, coming into contact with one another and having to touch other people’s packages. While the service involves staff time and effort, Segal says he’s also realized other benefits from it.

“Beyond the service itself, we have more regular interaction in different areas of the community by our team members,” Segal says. “So they’re experiencing what’s going on, and if they notice anything that could be touched up, for example, along the way, they let the team know. It’s helping us with overall maintenance of the community, because you have more eyes on what’s happening.”

Read the full feature on NAA News

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School is in session at the Optima Signature, a 56-story apartment tower in Streeterville.

Glencoe-based developer and architectural firm Optima is converting four of its 25 office suites in the 490-unit tower into classrooms, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The plan calls for “pandemic pods” that allow small groups of students to study together in person with a tutor, teacher or parent, the Tribune reported.

Long-term closures of daycare facilities and schools have pushed some real estate firms to think outside the box.

“For people who are living in the downtown environment, where they might be sharing a smaller space with two working parents and kids, those spaces can get small and loud and distracting,” Optima’s Ali Burnham told the Tribune. “Here, you’re not fighting for space.”

Interest will likely come from families whose children attend the Montessori school in the tower, which is located at 220 E. Illinois St., according to Burnham. The suites cost between $1,800 and $2,400 per month and do not include teachers or tutors.

Read the full feature at The Real Deal Chicago

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Back in the day, moving up to the corner office was a sure sign you’d made it. Offering greater room, abundant natural light from two walls of windows and dual perspectives on streetscapes below, a corner office was a coveted badge of success. But with more folks working from home, the corner office’s cache may be shifting to corner condominiums and apartments.

Optima Signature

Streeterville provides a dynamic backdrop for the luxury tower Optima Signature, situated steps from the city’s “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue. With an eye to creating dramatic views, the developer, Optima, expressly designed the building’s corner units with the intention of creating column-free perspectives.

The post-tensioned concrete structure incorporates a two-way cantilevered slab. The column was placed between the kitchen and living area rather than in the traditional corner, to ensure the layouts of residences delivered unobstructed, eye-popping views from the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

Read the full feature on Forbes

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