Productivity and efficiency are the keys to making any home office work, so make sure yours has all the right electronic tools

The term "home office" means different things to different people. Some view a home office as a place where they need to spend at least 40 hours a week. Other people might see it as a room where they can catch up on work they brought home from their cubicles downtown. And then there are those who imagine a home office as a spot where they can dispatch a few emails, pay the bills and surf the web.

Given the variety of work styles that exist, the design of a home office can take many forms. For people who work full-time at home, it's important that the home office be designed as a dedicated room isolated from the noisy parts of the house. Telecommuters, meanwhile, may be satisfied with finishing up projects in a spare bedroom. For some, a nook in the kitchen works just fine.

But no matter how you define a home office or where it resides, it's going to need a few key electronic systems to keep it humming.

The Right Room

Even if you can't see yourself working from home anytime soon, there may come a time when you will. For this reason, it pays to include a home office in the house plans. Build the room spacious enough to accommodate your current assortment of equipment comfortably, but with extra room to fit in new machines. The size of an average bedroom (80 square feet) should suffice for a one-person office.

Resist the urge to tuck the office into the corner of a basement or into the attic. These areas might provide the privacy you need to stay productive, but getting them into office shape can be costly. For example, windows might need to be added to the basement, or heating and cooling vents given to the attic. A ground-level room, by comparison, is often structurally and ergonomically office worthy right off the bat. Set apart from the busy parts of the home like the family room and the kitchen, a dedicated, ground-level home office offers both privacy and convenient access to the front door for picking up the mail and to the kitchen for grabbing a snack.

The Right Screen

A computer's speed and storage space are important features to consider when planning for a home office, but it's the monitor that will ultimately impact the room design. The hottest thing going in home offices these days is the flat LCD screen. An LCD monitor minimizes glare and takes up very little space on an office desk. No matter where you plan to put your office, be it the nook in the kitchen or a huge desk in a dedicated room, a sleek LCD monitor is going to look right at home. In fact, the entire screen can be built flush into the framework of a desk or a wall, making the computer monitor look more like a piece of furniture than a piece of technology. You also have the option of using a mount from a company like Peerless Industries or Chief Manufacturing to hang the monitor on the underside of a cabinet that sits above your desk. The under-cabinet mount is particularly beneficial in a kitchen- or bedroom-based home office. When you're not using the computer, you can flip the monitor flat up against the bottom of the cabinet.

The Right Wire

Chances are the computer that will reside in your home office won't be the only computer in your house. A networking system enables multiple computers to exchange files with one another and to share a single printer, Internet connection, hard drive and other peripherals. Wireless networking systems are extremely popular and affordable, but nothing beats the performance and reliability of using wire to link computers and peripherals.

But not any old wire will do. When many types of products start talking to one another, it becomes increasingly important that the wiring inside the house be well organized, that the connections on wall outlets be well labeled and that the ability to modify and add components to the network be ever-present and simple. That's why so many homebuilders, home systems installers and homeowners are now opting to install preconfigured systems of high-speed cabling, otherwise known as structured wiring, into their homes.

Typically, a structured wiring system includes Category 5 (or 5e) communications cabling and RG-6 coaxial cabling. Be sure your home systems installer runs two Category 5 cables to each telephone jack and two RG-6 coaxial cables to each coaxial cable outlet. You can minimize the number of outlets on the wall by consolidating each telephone jack and coaxial outlet into one wall outlet (called a multimedia outlet). Each wall of the home office should be fitted with at least one multimedia outlet to ensure that no matter where in the room the computer, telephone and other equipment are located, there's a connection nearby.

This same wiring infrastructure can support a corporate-style telephone system. Any telephone on the network can pick up a call on any line. For example, from the home office phone, you can answer a call coming in on the home line. Similarly, a call on the home line can be transferred to your office phone. A door intercom, a popular accessory offered by manufacturers of phone systems, can be connected to the network as well. Attached to a wall near the front door, the intercom rings your office phone when there's a visitor and allows you to speak to the guest. Even if you don't need a door intercom now, at least run the appropriate wire to the front door while your house is under construction so that your home is ready when you are.

The Right Lights

After a day of fluorescent bulbs burning into the back of your head, you'll want softer lighting in your home office. Simple, inexpensive dimmer switches can do the trick, but if you do more than just work in your home office, you may want to incorporate a more robust lighting control system into the room. Lighting control systems typically come with a keypad that lets you select one of several preset lighting scenes based on what you are doing in the room. Faint overhead lights and a few soft table lamps, for example, establish an ambiance that's ideal for music listening. A brighter scene might inspire you to scour the Wall Street Journal or finish up some paperwork. Or maybe you need just one basic "relax" scene, where a remote control gradually fades out the lights to whatever intensity you desire.

In those first few moments of moving into being-at-home mode, however, it's possible that business is still brewing in the back of your mind. The cell phone, pager and PDA that are still clipped to your hip certainly don't help you leave work behind, but they are necessary at times. Fortunately, there is a way to put those business tools to work toward your quest for quality time away from work. The Cendi system from CentraLite, for example, places control buttons on the screen of any PDA. The PDA transmits the command over wireless radio frequency (RF) airwaves to an RF-enabled PC, which holds a piece of lighting control software that relays the command(s) to the appropriate lights. CentraLite isn't the only manufacturer of lighting control to grant access to a home's lights through a PDA. Companies including Vantage, Lutron, and Litetouch have also web-enabled their lighting control systems.

The Right Sound

If you're the type of person who needs to keep on top of the news or who likes to kick back with a few favorite tunes during a break, be sure to incorporate a music system into your plans for a home office. But rather than stuff the room with its own stereo, consider piping in the news and music from the same stereo you plan to use in your family room. Getting the sound from point A to point B will require running wire from the stereo to some type of control device (such as a keypad or volume control knob) and also to speakers in the office.

A volume control like the VCIR from Xantech incorporates a knob and an infrared receiver into one wall plate. Mounted near the door of the home office, the VCIR lets you adjust the volume as you walk into the room. Keep a remote control on your desk as well. The infrared receiver, which looks like a flat, iridescent dime-shaped disc, picks up commands from the remote and shuttles them to the appropriate component in your rack of stereo equipment. For example, you could turn on the CD player, skip to a certain song and adjust the volume without ever leaving your chair.

Two speakers should suffice for background music. To minimize clutter, use in-wall or in-ceiling speakers, mounting them at ear level behind your chair. Positioned to either side of your head, the speakers will be able to produce a two-channel stereo effect.

Also consider speakers for your desk. You'll need them for any music and video that you access and store on your office computer. One trend is flat speakers that match a flat-panel LCD monitor. The Companion 3 multimedia speaker system from Bose, for example, includes two small speakers that can be attached to the monitor and a bass module for powerful sound effects.

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