If your place of business looks like the sort of office where Barry Gibb or Kenny Everett would feel perfectly at home, you may be appalled, and embarrassed to the point of going to work with a paper bag on your head, but you also may be on the leading edge of a growing trend. Retro and vintage office furniture has slowly been creeping back into the places where we earn our paychecks. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that a lava lamp would look good next to the picture of your significant other, it does mean that many businesses are looking for bargains when furnishing their offices, and trying their best to do more with a smaller budget.

It’s impossible to separate the current economic woes from the trend toward vintage office furniture; let’s face it, not a lot of places have as much cash to throw around anymore. You also can’t count out the impact of DIY reality shows, and programs that take old furniture and turn them into something really interesting. The byproduct of all this is that many of us are working in offices that look much more cool then they did a few years ago.

The impersonal cube farm or an office that sports a cold, sterile, high tech appearance(one that looks like it was inspired by the Death Star) have less personality then the offices decorated with vintage swing era furniture or healthy doses of art deco. While the latter were created by a boss with eye for bargains, the end result is a place of business that is much more visually interesting. Although the retro movement is a good one, most of us probably draw the line at bringing back the music of Cliff Richards or those boat anchor cell phones from the 80s.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under Biz Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.