Electric Standing Desks for Working at Home

A standing desk is for changing position. An hour up, an hour down, a phone call taken on your feet without leaving your work. A desk that makes the change easy, with a button and a saved height, is one you will go on using after the first month.

At home there is a second consideration, which is that the desk shares a room with a bed or a sofa. Thick steel columns and trailing cables look fine in an office and less fine beside the bookshelves. Some of these desks hide their mechanics well, some build in drawers and outlets, and a few are simply plain and well made.

Sunaofe Lunar Standing Desk

Cables are what spoil most standing desks. A monitor lead that hung neatly at sitting height pulls taut or swings loose once the top rises. The Lunar deals with that inside the desk itself. A flap in the surface opens onto a felt trough that travels up and down with the top, so the power strip and its tangle ride along out of sight.

The rest is restrained, with a wood-look top that has softly rounded corners, a white frame, and a control panel set flush into the front edge.

Vinsetto Electric Standing Desk With Memory Buttons

For a first standing desk, this is a sensible place to start. It is a plain rectangular top in a warm teak tone on a black frame, with nothing to learn. Four buttons store four heights, which is useful in a household where two people share the desk, since each can keep a sitting and a standing setting. A small display shows the height as it moves. It is a compact desk, the right scale for a laptop and one monitor in the corner of a bedroom.

Humanscale eFloat Quattro Standing Desk

Most standing desks announce themselves with two thick columns and a pair of long feet. The Quattro has four slim legs, one at each corner, and from across the room it could pass for a well-made writing table. That is the whole appeal. In a living room, a bedroom, or anywhere a desk has to live among ordinary furniture, it keeps the room from looking like an office.

The legs still rise at the touch of a switch built into the edge of the top, with two heights saved.

Homrest L-Shaped Electric Standing Desk With Storage

An L-shaped desk usually means a second table fixed on at a right angle. Homrest has built the short side as a cabinet, a block of drawers and cupboards in dark grey that stays on the floor while the walnut-toned top rises above it. Sitting or standing, the printer paper, chargers, and files are in the same place.

Outlets and USB ports are set into the desktop, so a laptop and a phone can charge without a cable trailing to the wall, and a panel below hides the cords from the rest of the room.

Reibii Electric Standing Desk With Cable Management

A fabric pocket hangs at the side of this desk, and it is the detail you come to rely on. Notebook, headphones, and tablet all go in it, the things that would want a drawer on a desk that has none. Cable clips along the front edge keep a charging lead from sliding off the back.

The white top has a shallow curve cut into the front, so you can pull the chair in close, and a color-changing light strip is included for anyone who likes a glow at the desk in the evening.

Humanscale eFloat Go 2.0 Sit Stand Desk

Humanscale makes office chairs and monitor arms for workplaces, and the eFloat Go is its plain, well-resolved standing desk for home. There is no gimmick to describe. It has a white top, a silver base, and a small handset under the front edge that shows the height and holds two charging ports for a phone.

What you are paying for is the making. The desk carries a ten-year manufacturer warranty, and it is the choice for someone who works from home every day and expects to keep a desk for a long time.

Claiks L-Shaped Standing Desk

The return on this desk can be fitted to the left or the right, a decision you make at assembly and can remake after a house move. That flexibility matters, because a corner desk only works if the long side faces the right wall.

All white, top and frame, it gives a great deal of surface without darkening a room. There is space for a bank of monitors. A good alternative is to keep work on one wing and everything else on the other, whether that is a sewing machine, a drawing pad, or a half-finished model.

RightAngle Transcend Sit to Stand Desk

Pale maple laminate over a black base gives the Transcend the look of a drafting table, and it is built along similar lines, with a crossbar tying the two legs together beneath the top. That bar is worth noticing. It is the sort of bracing you see on workbenches, and it marks the desk as a piece of commercial office furniture offered for home use. Three widths are available, and the long version has room for a drawing board beside the computer.

Vinsetto V-Shaped Electric Standing Desk

The top of this desk is a wide, shallow V, like a boomerang, and the shape has a purpose. Sit at the inside of the bend and both wings angle toward you, so a second monitor or a stack of papers is a turn of the head away instead of a reach. It also lets the desk sit across a corner with the user facing out into the room. In white with a white frame, it is a light-looking way to get a very large work surface.

ErgoAV L-Shaped Executive Standing Desk

The ErgoAV has the bearing of an executive desk. One end of its thick black top rests over a cabinet with three drawers and open shelves, giving it the solid, anchored look of traditional office furniture, and the desktop rises from there when you want to stand.

It suits a dedicated study, the sort of room with a door, where the desk is the main piece of furniture and can afford to look like it. The black wood grain is handsome with a leather chair and a brass lamp.

Setting Up a Standing Desk

Check that every cable has enough slack to reach the desk at its full height before you raise it, and keep the wall behind clear of shelves and windowsills the top could catch on its way up. Set the standing height so your forearms rest level on the surface with your shoulders relaxed.