French Country Office Decor Ideas: How One Item Can Unify a Room

In this post: Looking for office decor ideas with French Country style? Here’s how I unified the look of our home office with the addition of one new item.⇒

Do you have a work space you love?

Whether you work at home or just pay bills and do organizational paperwork, having a dedicated spot that you enjoy working in can make these tasks so much more pleasant.

In our old home I had an office I loved, surrounded on 3 sides by windows, overlooking our garden. The study in our new house has only one tiny window and the room is pretty small and dark. It needs all the help it can get in the way of decorating to make it an appealing place to get work done.

Because I work at home, I addressed this room immediately after we moved in, and you can see the first round of design decisions in THIS POST. I had started by selecting my lovely French desk and the large casement bookcase for storage. A pretty beginning, but the room lacked cohesion and warmth.

(See resource list below.)

Office Decor Ideas

While I moved on to other rooms in our home, the office stayed like that for over 2 years. Had I known how simple it would be to pull it all together, I wouldn’t have waited so long for the next update.

But sometimes you need to live with a room for a while to know what’s missing and, more importantly, to know how you’d like to refine the aesthetic.

As you can see above, the one element that’s pulled the space together and at the same time added cozy warmth is the lovely quatrefoil rug. The slate color works perfectly with my desk, yet the modern geometric pattern adds a punch of freshness to the room, an appropriate evolution given my style has matured into a modern version of French Country.

One of the trickier aspects of this room is that it is shared by my husband, who graciously accepted my penchant for French decor, as long as that beautiful curvy French desk was facing a TV. How could I say no?

But that made the other side of the room difficult to decorate. We needed guest seating, which had to be placed beneath the TV and I’ve never liked the way this facing wall looks. In the next round of changes, I hope to add a higher backed settee to potentially solve the awkward gap below the TV.

Next I focused on some of the decorative items in the room. The wall grouping is unchanged, as it sets the tone for the space and is comprised of many of my favorite design elements (which you can see summarized in my post The 6 Defining Style Elements I Use In Every Room).

I also aimed to simplify the items on the desk, attempting to include only what serves some useful purpose. The desk top had gotten cluttered with too many small items lined up across the top edge, constantly getting in the way when papers were spread out on the surface. Instead I looked to cluster fewer larger pieces in the corners for a more streamlined look.

In one corner the candlestick, above, is actually a placeholder for a girandole I have on order. The porcelain trinket box holds our used printer cartridges that are waiting to be recycled (a huge improvement over the old system which had them sitting on the desk top and falling on the floor from time to time!) The little porcelain mail holder in front of the candlestick holds business cards and post-it notes.

In the other corner sits a silver pitcher, a scented candle and a creamer I use as a pen holder.

At the center of the desk rests a gorgeous silver ink set, a recent vintage find that deserves this place of honor. I love that there’s space to breath around it, in line with my efforts to stay pared back and organized. You can also see new lattice file boxes in the bookcase behind the desk.

I moved the iron sphere lamps to another room where they work better and replaced them with these softer distressed urn lamps which lend a gentler homier touch to the top of the file cabinets.

Tucked in the far corner is a small French chair which is just the right size for the place it inhabits.

Finally, I added lilacs and peonies which made me want to stay in this room for the rest of the day!

I always design my spaces in stages, and this is the second round for this room. I already have plans for what’s next in terms of office decor ideas, but that phase will have to wait. I love when I get to this point with a room, because the bones are set and the fun is in the refinement. For now, I’m enjoying the new cohesive look and I just may be inspired to start my work day earlier because I enjoy sitting in here so much!

Here’s a list of my secrets to adding a sense of unified polish to a space:

• A large tonal rug
• A tranquil wall color
• Unfussy but well-tailored window coverings
• Neutral fabrics
• The right artwork and wall hangings, but not too much
• Limited well placed decorative objects

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