Why Home Feels Better Than the Office and What Commercial Spaces Can Learn

For example, a study found that 90% of remote workers report being as productive or more productive away from the office, with many surprised by their own performance.

As organisations redefine the role of the office, they face a pivotal question: what can commercial spaces learn from the home - especially if the goal is to make workplaces feel better.

The Evolution of the Office

Workplace design has always reflected broader social, economic, and technological shifts, evolving alongside the organisation of work itself.

Early offices were largely functional and hierarchical, shaped by clerical work and supervision. As industrialisation gave rise to white-collar professions, offices expanded in scale and complexity to support growing organisations.

By the mid-20th century, workplaces were generally more stable and spacious. Employees typically had assigned desks, while managers worked from private offices that often incorporated elements of domestic interiors. Softer furnishings, desk lamps, layered lighting and personal artefacts introduced a sense of comfort alongside authority, reflecting an early understanding of the relationship between environment and performance.

The 1960s saw the rise of the cubicle, originally intended to offer greater autonomy, visual privacy and flexibility within larger office floors. Over time, however, increasing standardisation and density reduced this human-centred ambition, shifting the focus back toward efficiency.

From the 1970s onwards, open-plan layouts, standardised furniture and uniform lighting became dominant, prioritising flexibility and space optimisation over sensory richness and personal control. In more recent years, these trends accelerated through hot-desking and shared zones. While technically agile, many offices lost a sense of ownership and environmental control, resulting in spaces that feel efficient and dynamic - but often emotionally neutral.

The Home Reveals What Was Missing

Working from home reintroduced something the modern office had gradually lost: agency over the environment. At home, people instinctively adjust lighting, move between spaces, and adapt their surroundings to suit their mood, task, or time of day. These small acts of control shape comfort and focus.

Lighting plays a central role in this experience. A single, flat overhead source rarely lights homes; instead, light is layered through a combination of daylight, task lamps and softer accent lighting. This creates visual richness and flexibility. By contrast, many offices still rely on uniform ceiling lighting that prioritises visibility over comfort, often contributing to glare, visual fatigue and a sense of detachment.

Fagerhult’s research on the history of office lighting shows how, over time, many workplaces shifted away from more nuanced lighting approaches that supported human comfort and circadian alignment toward standardised solutions focused primarily on energy performance and compliance. The home, by contrast, retained many of those intuitive lighting principles.

Bringing the Best of Home into the Office

Redesigning workplaces to feel more comfortable - without losing their professional purpose - means creating environments that respond intelligently to human needs.

One solution is tunable white lighting. By allowing colour temperature to shift over the course of the day - warmer in the morning and evening, cooler during peak focus times - spaces can better align with natural circadian rhythms. This supports alertness, reduces visual strain, and creates environments that feel more intuitive than those with static lighting.

Layered lighting strategies - combining ambient, task and accent lighting - reflect the way people naturally light their homes, supporting comfort, focus and choice throughout the working day.

Coupled with smart lighting controls, workplaces can become responsive rather than prescriptive. These systems adjust lighting based on time of day, occupancy or task, while still providing users with simple ways to customise their immediate surroundings. This balance restores a sense of personal agency without adding complexity.

Designing for Belonging and Choice

Beyond lighting technology, the way spaces are organised and understood matters. One reason a home feels comfortable is that it is personal - even if only at the level of choice and control.

Commercial spaces can support that feeling by designing for legibility and behaviour. Lighting can define zones for focus, collaboration and restoration through subtle shifts in intensity or tone rather than physical partitions. These visual layers help people understand the space instinctively, reducing cognitive load and supporting fluid movement throughout the day.

When environments prioritise choice and variety - from bright, alert task zones to softer, calmer areas - they feel less like tools for productivity and more like places where people can be productive in ways that suit them.

From Places of Attendance to Places People Choose

The pandemic didn’t render offices obsolete. It did, however, reveal what people value in a working environment: autonomy, comfort and control. The challenge - and opportunity - for commercial design is to bring those qualities into offices without diluting their purpose.

Adaptable lighting solutions, such as tunable white systems, smart controls, responsive sensors, and task lighting, provide a clear path forward. These technologies support human-centred design, improve energy and operational performance, and help workplaces feel more supportive and intuitive.

At their best, offices should not ask people to tolerate discomfort as a prerequisite for professionalism. They should make comfort part of how work happens - and in doing so, make the office a place people don’t just attend, but choose.

If you would like to know more about how Fagerhult’s lighting solutions support comfort, flexibility and well-being, get in touch.