How to create a professional home workspace – and inject your personality

How do you create a professional home workspace in a place that is also for living? Importantly, how do you inject your own personality into a space where you work but also call home? What does your environment tell other people you interact with? How is your personal brand coming across? We speak with architect and designer Jane Leach to answer all our questions.

Making your space represent you

We often talk about making your home your own. By this we mean that it reflects your tastes, lifestyle, values, sense of style, and showcases important elements of your life such as relationships with family and friends, culture, religion, and hobbies. These we can display in a variety of ways through artefacts, artwork, personal photographs, paint colours and their combinations, along with materials, textures and patterns.

When we look around our space and see that it reflects who we are as people, that is when we feel that it is a space that is ours - it represents us and the things that are important to us. Someone could come into your space and immediately get an understanding of who you are from what they see there.

Studies have shown that we feel as attached to the space around us as we do to the people we love. We identify with our environment, and when it becomes damaged we feel significant loss and grief. We might not choose to feel this way, but it is a commonly recognised connection that people feel with our homes both in the micro sense of within our own four walls, and within a wider sense of neighbourhood, city, region and country. Some of this is likely to come from familiarity, as well as the building of personal memories from experiences of everyday events that have occurred in these spaces around us creating our own personal connection with our environment.