office book paint hack

Photo: Courtney Apple

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The Paint Hack to Know if You Occasionally Work from Home

Apartment dwellers with limited square footage tend to eat, entertain, lounge, read and work in the living room. For those yearning a separate office area (that's not covered in potato chips, remote controls and paperbacks), here's a simple way to fake it. All you need is a bucket of blue paint. Find an unused wall—the narrow space between two doors or windows, for example—and paint it in a striking color. In designer Naomi Stein's loft, she used an eye-catching Yves Klein–inspired blue to define an office space. Pro tip: Blue is an unexpected neutral that's easy to pair with almost any color. "This nook felt sort of awkward until we used a bold treatment to make it purposeful," Stein says.