Décor Parkour

NOTE: Admittedly, I’m probably...definitely...going to bring up a couple of anecdotes I’ve mentioned in previous articles, but this is my little corner of the internet, so I claim the right to repeat myself a little...or a lot. And full disclosure, this article is mainly much ado about nothing, but I felt like sharing a few observations and stories, just for shits and giggles.

While people place a lot of emphasis on personal appearance and speech, I sometimes wonder if they miss the importance of what their surroundings or personal space tell others about them. Next to many nonverbal cues we receive (e.g., body language), how someone has decorated their home or office can say so much about them.

As both a visual learner, writer and observer, and painfully curious personality, one of my favorite experiences with someone new is studying their room, home, or office. What they have in their environment and how they decorate it can say a lot about them (or at least offer a few hints). Do they have plants, fake plants, or no plants? Pictures of family and friends? Artwork? Books, collectables, or knickknacks? High end furniture, Ikea furnishings, or eclectically mismatched dumpster dive pieces? All of these things give us glimpses of who they are – sentimental or austere, comfortable or spartan, laid down roots or just a place to sleep and eat?

Not that my powers of aesthetic deductive logic are as keen as Sherlock Holmes or Batman. I once visited a friend of friend at their McMansion which was so sparsely furnished that the TV sat on a foot locker, the living room had folding deck chairs, and the kitchen was set up with paper plates, plastic silverware, traditional red Solo cups. I made the semi-serious joke about their just moving in, and after a bit of a laugh they admitted to having lived there for five years.

ANYWAY…

I began my career at a small training company that was notoriously frugal.1 It was headquartered in a set of townhouse-style office buildings and didn’t really do much in terms of renovations before hanging up their shingle. The carpets were fairly old, fixtures dated, and the heat and air conditioning left many freezing to death or air fried at the wrong times of the year. The furniture was a curious mish mash of whatever furniture the former tenants left behind (in this case, an architectural firm with oddly-shaped large desks used for drafting plans), a few new pieces of furniture, and anything else that was bought from garage sales or possibly off the side of a country road (e.g., barely any of the conference room chairs matched). My first shared office had a twenty-foot-high arched ceiling with a dividing wall that only went up half way to separate that office from the one next door. To compensate for the lack of privacy (the coworker next door was habitually so loud on the phone that they may have well been sitting next to me), previous occupants had stacked cardboard boxes on top of the dividing wall up to the ceiling (which only marginally helped with the habitual loud talker next door).2

After several years there, the company finally spent some money to freshen up the decor because 1) they had several new big money clients coming in for meetings that they wanted to impress, and 2) a then current client made a passing comment about the shoddy state of the office. During this time, I was given the task of cleaning out and reorganizing several storage closets that hadn’t been touched and/or entered in years. The result of all that work was finding stores of old documents and floppy disks (some of which went back to when I was in high school), various holiday decorations – falling apart or other disrepair, and other miscellaneous junk (mostly thrown out).3

When I finally left that job, I was more than overjoyed to begin work at a new company with a modern, functional office space. It was like sitting in a new car compared to my previous work digs. I was starting as a newly minted proposal writer on a team of writers, and they kept us in an office space that was often referred to as “the fishbowl” since we had a large window wall where anyone walking up and down the hallway could see us.4 During the holidays, the company had a door decorating contest and we would go wild with the window wall as a matter of satisfying my boss’ obsession need to win (the best was creating a holiday version of the kid’s game Candyland…though it involved cutting out and taping up countless pieces of construction paper…but it won).

As time went on, I wanted or needed to dive back into the less-than-auspicious realm job hunting, and that provided opportunities to see and experience some slick and equally perplexing offices. However, one of the happier things about job hunting is it often thrilled my love of experiencing a new room, home, or office.

It’s hard not to be impressed when walking into a shiny and stylish office where a serious amount of time, energy, thought, and money went into the look and feel of the place. I’ve been in some offices where you didn’t want to touch anything because it was all so pristine, and others that looked like someone was trying to design a set for a sci fi movie or TV show. Clearly, office décor is aimed at trying to impress or intimidate visitors, though I sometimes wonder if the décor might be overkill or flash over substance. For example, I interviewed at one company that looked like something off of Star Trek – clean lines, neutral colors with strategically-placed touches of color, glass and chrome furnishings, glitzy large screen TVs, and sleek teleconference call cameras and devices. However, interviewing with the married couple who ran the place left me with the impression that for all of the shine, there was very little substance to the job or corporate vision beyond just making them more money.

By contrast, I’ve walked into other offices and wondered if the company would still be in business the following day. For example, I applied for and landed an interview at a tech company with a dynamite website. All cleaned and dressed up, I was struck by the dilapidated condition of the company’s office – no two pieces of furniture matched, frayed carpet was either peeling up in corners or duct taped back down along well-worn seams, and computer cables ran up and down the hallways. The conference room I interviewed in was an eccentric collection of chairs, a conference table with literal holes in it (and I’m still not sure whether by accident or design), and a coffee maker precariously sitting on top of a pedestal of unstable milk crates. My optimism for the job was equally jaded by the fact that the “executive” I interviewed with wore torn jeans and a barely-holding-itself-together concert t-shirt dating back to sometime in the 1980s (plus, they advised that I would need to provide my own laptop). In another case, I interviewed for a job where the office looked and felt more like the person’s home than an office, complete with homey/antique furniture and Target-bought area rugs.

On a more individual level, and when they were more commonly held face-to-face, I usually hoped that interviews happened in someone’s personalized office, as opposed to the relatively blank slate of a conference room. Just like clothes, hair, and jewelry, how a person decorates their office speaks volumes about them. No matter the reason, I tend to do a quick scan of someone’s office or room when I first walk in, trying to catch any particular interests, clues about their personalities, or general vibe about how best to converse with them.

For one interview, I had just taken up motorcycle riding as a hobby, and noticed that the Business Developer VP I met had motorcycle-related pictures and a metal sculpture of one sitting on their bookshelf. I completely blew the interview, clearly giving them answers they didn’t like, but we had a great talk about motorcycle riding and travel. For another interview, the person’s office was filled with crosses – as in every shelf, every wall, and their desk – there must have been dozens of them. Some were antiques, many were arts and crafts projects, others more objects de art. Despite all of this and their demeanor, which betrayed absolutely no religious view whatsoever, I could not understand why they decorated their office with them. Finally, at the end of the interview, I rolled the dice and made a query about the crosses. It turns out their hobby was collecting them, mostly at art shows and flea markets, and used them as a litmus test for job candidates, seeing who would be too intimidated/meek or curious/brave enough to ask about them (despite my asking, I didn’t get the job, but had a pretty weird vibe from them anyway).

In my own office spaces, I’ve tried to add a personal touch where I can. I’ve shared my love of superheroes in some way, always family pictures on my desk, and other personal items to add a little flair to my workspace. I even earned a bit of a reputation at a more recent job for having one of the more decorated work aces in the office.

I’m a firm believer that the look and atmosphere of a place can very much give away its feel or vibe. I’m not saying it’s a foolproof way of deducing what kind of people, corporate culture, or work that goes on there, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts when I first look around. Sometimes, I catch myself caught up in the “shock and awe” of a slick and expensive looking layout, and other times I can’t get the Hell out of there fast enough because it screams “we’re a fly-by-night operation.” They say clothes make the man, and the same applies to an office.

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1 They had a well-earned reputation of under bidding their offers to win work, and passed those savings down through ridiculously substandard salaries/hourly rates, reusing the same project content or templates, and obviously neglecting the office.

2 At some point, this same coworker was either fired or quit (stories vary), and it fell on my office mates and myself to clear out their office afterward the dust settled (i.e., they did not leave quietly). The former coworker had left a treasure trove of myriad work-related materials and questionable personal items. This included old floppy and zip disks, hardcopies or random project documents, and several tchotchkes that let’s just say were grossly inappropriate to have at an office. The most confused-puppy-head-tilting item was a holiday card with a photo of someone’s four pre-teen/teenage daughters that…well, let’s just say it embarrassed and/or made some us a little uncomfortable (and that’s all I’ll share about it here).

3 We had to dig through piles of old IT equipment just to find a floppy disk drive that could read those disks. This included a stack of eight-inch floppy disks that were deemed too old to still be readable and would’ve been too expensive to find someplace to read them anyway. One of the more…conservative…members of the office asked if they could have them. Later they returned them full of bullet holes from target practice.

4 I liked to joke to new team members we brought on board that my boss requested a window wall so it would be impossible for us to sneak in if we were running late to work. The only downside is it left us a bit self-conscious about a few coworkers who had a habit of staring at us as they walked by (arguably not realizing they were doing it).