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A deep believer in the magical healing powers of aesthetics, color, and sound (and something of a shaman), Ivy Ross is not your typical tech executive. But her spiritual approach is not some woo-woo fantasy either. From her office at Google’s Design Lab in Mountain View, California, the company’s cool-headed vice president of hardware design means business. 

There, she steers her team of 150 in making some of today’s most standout gadgets, from phones to smart speakers. Since first unveiling its line of hardware in the fall of 2016, Google has quickly gained a reputation for creating soft, simple, and remarkably attractive products that sensitively combine color (often pastel-y, some that pop), material (most notably textiles), and form (nature inspired) to surprisingly pleasurable effect. 

Forget shiny, hard black boxes. Ross and her colleagues make playful pieces intended to fit into their surroundings (or, in the case of the Pixel phone, our lives). We stopped by the 70,000-square-foot studio to find out how, in a relatively short period of time, they’ve crafted such a strong signature look.

In 2015, when Google was forming its in-house hardware unit, about 25 staffers—including Ross and Isabelle Olsson, now director of design for home, wearables, and color—decamped for an off-site brainstorming retreat. Their goal? To clearly and succinctly define the Google hardware aesthetic. 

Ultimately, the team arrived at three words: human, optimistic, and bold. Ross, who began her career as a jewelry artist before working in marketing and development roles at companies including Calvin Klein, Mattel, and Gap, understood the essentialness of the exercise. “Before you attempt something like this,” she says, referring to creating a line of products for a global brand from scratch, “there has to be a shared vision and connectivity. Especially when you let people loose to work in a variety of categories. We tried to really give a way to embody what we were talking about.”

That logic is clear as soon as you step inside the team’s new HQ, a light and airy two-story sanctuary that they moved into in 2018. Organized into labs—including one for color and another for materials—the space encapsulates the Ross ethos: warm, welcoming, open. “People forget technology can be cozy,” says Philip Battin, head of special projects. “Our building doesn’t feel like a hospital, it feels like a home in some way.” 

What’s the trending shade of 2020?
“Blue is very appealing right now. Unconsciously, it’s a calming color when things are chaotic,” explains Ross, adding that may also be because there’s “a lot of talk around sustainability and oceans.” On the whole, Google’s palettes have been ahead of the curve. Take coral, which the company used in its first Home Mini (released in fall 2017) and was later named Pantone’s 2019 color of the year (this year’s Pantone pick is classic blue). Likewise, inspirations at the materials lab come from beyond the tech world. “What’s going on in furniture and shoes and things like that,” says Battin of their interdisciplinary approach. “It gets really exciting, because that can help push the aesthetics of what we do.”

The design steers clear of the cubicle culture found in many other Google offices and instead features soothing colors and birchwood accents, living room–like lounges decorated with Muuto and Knoll, tinted glass partitions that let in lots of natural light, open-plan desks, and a library filled with employees’ favorite books—the kind of personal touches uncommon in a large corporation. Marguerite Bergman, [the former] head of packing design, adds that the office sparks creativity: “Everything is visible—nothing is locked up. We’re very transparent in how we share our work.” (Because so many top-secret concepts are out in the open, the building is under extremely tight security.)

While the innovative use of textiles in Google’s products no doubt serves an essential role in helping things stand out (the material lab is home to more than 1,000 swatches), the company’s subtle but idiosyncratic color choices have proven especially central. Olsson says that questions like “How do we harmonize?” have been key to their process. “But also: ‘How do we pop?’ We always want an expressive option.” 

Whether it’s a purplish Pixel 3A smartphone, a coral Google Nest Mini, or a wasabi-hued button on the Stadia controller, Google’s often-adventurous palette makes refreshingly out-of-the-norm statements. Going bold was also a way to capture attention—an important factor, according to Ross, because “we were late to the game in terms of electronics.” Max Yoshimoto, [the former] director of consumer hardware industrial design, elaborates: “When we started to look at color accents and pops, it clearly became a thing for us that was unique. Nobody else was really doing it.”

Still, that direction was a departure from the expected: In a twist, the hardware colorways—such as aqua, chalk, charcoal, sand, and sky—are in no way an extension of Google’s primary-hued logo. “A lot of people ask, ‘Why are the products not red, blue, green, and yellow?’” says Olsson. For Ross and Olsson, it was important to stay rooted in the brand’s DNA without being too literal and create a wholly distinctive palette. 

Their approach seems to be working. The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was using the Pixel phone in public soon after it launched when someone came up to him, not knowing who Pichai was, and asked, “Is that the new Google phone?” They had recognized the device’s bright orange button on the back. Essentially, the team’s color development is “a reflection of what society is feeling at the time,” says Ross. “We really believe that we can convey optimism.” 

With a background in fashion and psychology (she minored in the latter at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology), Ross is constantly looking for cultural cues about what’s new, next, and fresh: “I find it fascinating that if you track when certain colors come into popularity, it relates to what’s going on in the world and what people might be unconsciously craving.” This mindset continues to push Ross and her team to produce products that surprise and delight. Largely via color and tactility, Google’s devices encourage users to engage with them—much like the Design Lab spaces. “Our design principles and aesthetic, in part, enliven the senses,” shares Ross. “You could say it’s neuroaesthetic. It makes us all feel alive.”

This story was originally published in our Spring 2020 issue with the headline “Color Code.”

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Life as a digital nomad doesn’t always mean jetting off to places that’ll make your coworkers jealous. In my case, it simply means moving from room to room in my one-bedroom apartment. Even in my pre-pandemic office days, my colleagues might find me checking emails from the lobby sofa, writing in the conference room alone after lunch, or brainstorming anywhere outside as far as the Wi-Fi could reach. And ever since working from home became my life, I’ve still refused to sit at a desk. Until recently. 

Herman Miller’s new sit-to-stand Passport work table is made for fidgety WFH-ers like me. Two compact sizes (the bigger one is barely over 2 feet at 27-by-20 inches), three tabletop finishes, and six base colors give you more than 40 combos to choose from, and casters make it easy to move to any room. I opted for the large (plenty of space for my ever-present coffee, a glass of water, and a snack within reach of my MacBook), with the top in ash and painted metal base in canyon, a rusty shade of orange. The small one doesn’t come with casters, so that was a no for me—I obviously need to be mobile.

Aside from giving me the freedom to roam, the best part about this mobile workstation is that it moonlights as other furniture pieces when it’s not acting as a desk. Here’s how a typical day looks with me and my table on the move. 

8:30 a.m.

I start seated, with my desk next to the sofa, and stack a few cushions behind me to get extra-comfy. This is where I check emails, get organized for the day, and do any kind of focus work. 

1 p.m.

After lunch, it’s time to stand up. I slide my setup over to the living room window for a change in scenery (there’s better light for my afternoon Zoom calls, too). A squeeze of a lever under the table’s surface brings the whole thing up to standing height—it’s pneumatic, so there’s never a need to be anchored near an outlet.

5 p.m.

As I start wrapping up my day, the table ends up in the kitchen with me to prep for happy hour with friends. I don’t have a formal dining room, so when I’m entertaining, I load up the Passport in the kitchen with charcuterie or cocktail glasses and carafes and cart it back into the living area, where guests are piled on the sectional. On a more chill night, it’s my version of a chic TV tray for solo dinners while I catch up on my shows.  

8 p.m.

I have trust issues with bath boards, so instead of testing gravity over a body of water, I bring a few essentials (usually a glass of wine, my laptop, a sugar scrub, and a candle) to the table. Another squeeze of the lever, and I push the top down to its lowest position and slide it next to the tub for a wind-down session. A few sips of a Cab Sauv and an episode of Succession count as self-care, right?

For hybrid workers or a restless rising Sagittarius like myself, the Passport is the perfect piece for those who don’t want to eat up square footage with a more permanent WFH situation. With a range from $600 to $1,020, it is pricey for its size, but as a multitasking item from a name like Herman Miller, this investment will work overtime to pay its dues.

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Interior designer Sidika Owen d’Hauteville could walk into a Victorian-era house in central London with her eyes closed and move around the space with ease—almost all of them have the same layout. “I once read a statistic that more than half the homes in London are Victorian,” says d’Hauteville. On the main level, she expects to find a long, double reception room that stretches the depth of the house. Typically, people designate the area toward the front of the home as the living area, while the rear space goes underused (some families might turn it into a second dining room; others, a kids-only TV space). But when a family of five living in the northwest neighborhood of Little Venice asked d’Hauteville to completely renovate their Victorian house, the designer decided to break with the status quo. 

“My aim was to connect these two rooms so that they feel like one big space,” she shares. Her solution: create custom slatted oak cabinetry that runs along the wall, visually uniting the two zones. The result turned out to be way more functional than anyone could have imagined. Within the cupboards, d’Hauteville tucked away a TV, bar, fireplace, and—get this—two desks. 

Incorporating a mini office into the typically overlooked space was essential. The father works two days a week at home and there wasn’t another place in the house to carve out a separate room. Still, d’Hauteville didn’t want the rest of the family to have to stare at Dad’s mountain of paperwork when they’re all hanging out. The designer called on furniture maker Andy Gardiner to build cabinets with discreet doors that can flip down and double as a desk, not unlike a tray table on an airplane. The textured wood treatment naturally disguises the seams.

The whole thing juts out 35 inches when open, and the melamine surface on the interior is not only easy to wipe down but it’s lightweight, which was key to the construction. D’Hauteville had the ribbed facade stained an orangey tone to make the oak look a touch closer to teak, lending warmth to the newly renovated space. 

“At the end of the day, it was important that they could hide their work and relax or entertain,” says the designer. “The clients also didn’t want to see computer screens—they’re always best kept hidden.”

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We’ve learned a lot of new information about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex through Netflix’s six-episode limited series Harry & Meghan, like the fact that Beyoncé has Meghan Markle‘s phone number and that Prince Harry is a pretty decent wildlife photographer. We also got a better understanding of how they live at home with their two kids, Archie and Lilibet, specifically their latest house in Montecito, California. While we don’t see much of the interior during the show, you might recall that we got a peek inside Markle’s office not too long ago.

In honor of her 40th birthday last year, she gave away a gift—or two, if you ask us. The duchess not only released a video announcing her new mentorship program, 40×40, but did so from her WFH space, offering a glimpse of where she gets it all done. 

“I’m asking 40 friends to donate 40 minutes of their time to help mentor a woman who’s mobilizing back into the workforce,” Markle tells her pal Melissa McCarthy via Zoom. She stacks her books to prop up her laptop (stars—they’re just like us!) on a dining table–turned–desk with major French farmhouse vibes. We’ll save you the Google rabbit-hole dive—it looks to be the Bander dining table from Pottery Barn.

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Bander Dining Table, Pottery Barn ($1,699)

Yes, it’s on the pricey side at $1,699, but you’re getting your money’s worth: The pine piece is an impressive 83 inches long (Markle set hers up as a workspace for two, and there’s still plenty of room for files and a carafe of water). Curvy baluster legs elevate the rustic wood finish, so it manages to mesh easily with both the elegant wainscoting and California-cool jute rug in her space.

If the table isn’t the right fit for your space, never fear: We found a few more look-alikes.

Valerie 63” Pine Dining Table, Wayfair ($580)

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Molinaro 63” Pine Solid Wood Dining Table, Ophelia & Co. ($640)

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Francis Dining Table, Arhaus ($2,699)

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Carlisle Farmhouse Dining Table, The Bella Cottage ($2,998)

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Bordeaux Dining Table, Classic Home ($1,735)

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For WFH-ers whose only choice is to take meetings from their dining room, we can imagine no better alternative. Come sunset, swap the laptop for a cocktail and a couple friends (the table sits up to six). Work who?

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Their apartment in Brooklyn is the first place the Minor family has owned—and potentially their last. “I am not planning on ever buying property again in New York; it’s a wild process,” says Kass Minor, laughing, who shares the space with her husband, Cornelius, and their two daughters, ages 8 and 10. “This really is our forever home.” 

With the couple entering their 40s, they were finally able to pool their savings to acquire a luminous loft in Prospect Heights with views of Manhattan’s iconic skyline. But while it ticked off their needs for two bedrooms and some outdoor space (there’s a shared terrace), the existing decor was positively dungeon-esque. Formerly the printing press of the New York Daily News, the 1,100-square-foot unit’s glossy red walls and abundance of black steel balustrades weren’t exactly joyful. 

“Kass came to me and said: ‘Can you make this work for our family and source nice pieces that we can keep for years?’” recalls Alicia Hassen of Brooklinteriors. “But after touring it, my response was: ‘We have some serious work to do!’”

The budget wasn’t limitless, nor was the time frame—Hassen had just two months to reimagine things with the help of MSV Builders. Yet in that time she managed to execute a sensitive overhaul, creating a calming space for the whole family to rest, work, and play. Here’s how.

Tweak by Tweak

“This was not a gut renovation by any means,” says Kass. However, she was happy to follow Hassen’s suggestions to sand back the yellowing floors, repaint the wall of existing built-ins, and update the existing kitchen cabinets with new fronts. The strange, surfboard-shaped island was an obvious casualty; a chic pale quartz countertop now sits in its place. Neutral upper cupboards enhance the loft’s airy feeling, but a run of Shaker-style doors below in Benjamin Moore’s brilliantly named Luck of the Irish cater to Kass’s love of color. “I think I looked at a thousand shades of green,” she says with a laugh. The same goes for the slice of mosaic backsplash above the sink in a sea of neutral tiles.

Buy Once, Buy Better

Kass wanted this apartment to grow with her family. Cue the…cream sofa? “I was nervous, but to prove my point about it being stain resistant, I poured red wine on the swatches and the pale chenille performed better than the taupe—it just fell right off,” explains Hassen.

With the view that the bulk of the furniture budget should be spent on everyday items in hard-wearing materials, Hassen steered the couple toward a dining table with a concrete base from Yucca Stuff, a design studio based in Hassen’s new hometown of Austin, where Texas’s material palette informs each design. “I would never have known where to find it,” says Kass.

Glass in Session

Kass had a vision for the glassed-in space in the living area, which previously acted as a bedroom: “When I said to Alicia that I wanted it to be like one of the common rooms in Harry Potter, she was like, ‘Do you mean a classroom?,’ which made me laugh because my husband and I are educators.” That’s exactly what Kass got: a place where she can work at her desk and the children can craft around the table—which they do most days. “It’s nice to have a dedicated space that is separate yet still connected,” says Kass. To save time and money, Hassen bought premade sliding doors for the existing frame versus a custom set.

Lighten Up

At the top of the stairs, a once sad, low-ceilinged room (it’s only 4 feet) is now a sunny den, just the right height for the girls. Removing the dark railing in favor of white banisters helped flood the windowless space with natural light. “Kass’s daughters love to read, and this is a cool little retreat separate from their bedroom, where they can hang with friends,” Hassen explains. She followed suit in their parents’ mezzanine-like bedroom overlooking the Harry Potter space, swapping the visually heavy iron partition for a wall-to-wall glass panel instead. 

Get in the Zone(s)

Although this apartment is much bigger than the Minors’ previous rentals, as ever with New York City, space is a premium. “I really wanted there to be areas for different groups to congregate in, rather than everybody centralized in one space,” Kass says.

Zoning the open-concept living area was made possible by furniture: The sofa is turned away from the dining table to designate TV time; a desk for Cornelius is built into the shelving by the window; and island seating provides a spot for the little ones to eat while the grown-ups enjoy some adult conversation when friends visit. Even Boris, the family cat, doesn’t have to share his bathroom thanks to an ingenious cutout under the stairs. 

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My husband, Paul Ferney, is an artist, and despite our initial thinking of finding him a studio, due to pandemic lockdowns, that was suddenly off the table. So instead of cramming him in a corner of the bedroom, we moved the dining table into the living space of our New York apartment and set out to find some storage for all his supplies. The challenge was to make this area inspiring but also a reflection of his personality. I wanted it to feel as beautiful as his paintings. Here’s how I did it.

Think Beyond Gallery White

The room has nice light and big windows, but design-wise, it’s pretty simple. The only thing Paul and I knew was that we didn’t want stark-white gallery walls. The colors he paints with need to pop and look nice, but the walls shouldn’t feel cold. We wanted something in the muddy gray family, so we chose Valspar’s Soft Pelican. 

Organized Doesn’t Have to Mean Hidden

When you’re actively working, you make a mess, and it can happen very quickly. So thinking ahead, the main problem we knew we’d face was trying to have a controlled mess, and that comes from functional storage. I put everything Paul reaches for on a daily basis out in beautiful glass jars and different bowls, which makes them easier to access but also look intentional. Now you walk in the room and see all of these brushes and paints. They elicit a similar feeling to when you’re a kid, or even an adult, and you have a pad of blank paper and fresh pencils—it’s exciting to get to work. 

Buy Your Cabinets in Bulk

Having high-use items out in the open is great, but ensuring there was plenty of closed cabinetry was equally important. Anything he didn’t need easy access to, from cardboard boxes for shipping to canvas stretching tools and extra frames, we tucked away inside IKEA Ivar units. We lined the entire workspace with them; they’re wonderful because they’re 32 inches tall, so there are a lot of modular shelves to work with. But they’re also the perfect height to prop a canvas against for display or to dry since there’s no room for a full easel. With the larger pieces, Paul paints with the canvas leaned on the walls from a thrifted counter stool. 

The other thing about the Ivar units is that they’re stackable. You can either have them in a row or turn a couple into a bookcase. We painted ours the same shade as the wall to make them look more seamless.

Keep Storage Solutions Simple

After Paul paints, he needs a lot of open air for his work to dry, and it can take several days, so only having picture ledges or the tops of the Ivars wasn’t going to be enough. We built a plywood rack in just a weekend with standard hardware store 2-by-4s. That was a big, big win for getting organized. It’s one of those projects you mean to do for forever, and we finally just made ourselves do it. The form is really simple, but you can pack a lot of paintings into the slots. I’m a practical person first and foremost, so this room was less about a design transformation and more about knowing how he would use the space. Now he’s in there constantly, and every nook and cranny has been (very quickly) filled with both old and new works. 

IVAR Cabinet, Ikea ($70)

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Soft Pelican, Valspar

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“That’s what air mattresses are for,” David Quarles told himself when he decided to turn the spare bedroom in his Memphis house into an office. The multi-hyphenate (he is a jewelry maker, Zumba instructor, and interior designer) was forced to take his career(s) home when the monthly rent for the downtown studio space he was using spiked—and that was before COVID hit and it became the norm to WFH. 

For a cool minute, the former bedroom served all three of his professional pursuits: It’s where he took Zoom meetings with clients, soldered necklaces, and broke a sweat. “It was getting to be too much,” recalls Quarles. After building a separate gym outside, he focused on creating an equally good-looking and functional office where he could go from preparing a jewelry shipment to assembling a mood board in a flash. “I definitely feel like if you’re going to choose to work from home, why not make it feel like an escape?” he says. Ahead, Quarles shares four ways he made the room do overtime.

Fight the Midday Slump With Vibrant Walls 

Covering all four walls in Chasing Paper’s Mud Cloth peel-and-stick wallpaper was as much a practical decision as it was a personal one. “I like to design from what my history is, where my family comes from, so I wanted something that spoke to the African side of my ancestry,” he explains. The 3D-like effect of the print (it almost looks like an actual textile hanging on the wall) helps detract from the fact that the original surface behind the treatment is textured—and not in a good way. “It masks the bumps,” he points out.

Designate a Hiding Spot for the End of the Day

Desk storage was particularly key for Quarles, who had previously relied on a basic white sawhorse table from IKEA as his workstation. The tabletop, naturally, always looked cluttered. “I need a place where I can shove some tools when I don’t feel like doing a full cleanup at night,” he shares. The Living Spaces piece he opted for his jewelry zone (both desks are from the brand’s Hollis collection) features a deep cubby where he can toss his soldering tools. That way, when he walks in the next morning, he doesn’t instantly feel overwhelmed. It also helps that all his beads and metal components are neatly organized (and color-coded) in semitransparent boxes on the shelves—an upgrade from the crates that used to live on the floor. 

Use Greenery as Cord Camouflage

The pegboard above Quarles’s jewelry-making station keeps his most-used tweezers and pliers in arm’s reach, but to make the flat white catchall look more worthy of hanging against the blue backdrop, he incorporated decorative elements like a little rechargeable picture light and plant clippings. Across the room, at his interior design desk setup, a small pothos plant is situated in front of the router to disguise the unsightly tech.

Turn Up the Volume on Your Lighting

To help his clients pinpoint their design style, Quarles will often ask them to identify a song (or playlist) they’d imagine themself listening to in the room to try to get at the overall vibe they want to achieve. “Music is very much an influential part of my process,” he says. Naturally, when he’s deep into putting together contracts and pulling samples, he’ll throw on some tunes for himself to help stay motivated and inspired. The reason you don’t see a big black box around? His speaker is in the task lamp. “It’s a lightbulb speaker—and it’s very loud,” he admits.

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Until this past Thanksgiving, Vancouver-based interior designer Gillian Segal had never seen her Palm Beach, Florida, project in person. She worked 100 percent remotely (think: so many weekend-antiquing FaceTimes) and had spent nearly six months adding character and personality to a blank-slate new build from afar. “She found me through Instagram and asked if I was up for the challenge,” remembers the designer. Finally, over turkey and mashed potatoes, Segal met her client in person. One of the projects they could reminisce on: a functional workspace for the fashion industry creative. Juggling an all-hands meeting and her kids’ homework time at the dining table simply hadn’t been cutting it.

When in Doubt, Go Green

Previously an all-white box, the room is now swathed in a sage green paint—Card Room Green by Farrow & Ball to be exact—from wall to wall, including the ceiling. Segal knew (or rather hoped) that working from home wouldn’t last forever, so she wanted the area to be as versatile as possible. “It needed to be a space where the kids could come hang out but also exude this calm energy,” she explains. A neutral, in Segal’s mind, thanks to its cool undertones, the verdant shade could serve all the room’s possibilities.

Find a New Frame of Reference

Colonial-style picture-frame molding around the entire space was the original plan, but when all was said and mocked up, it just looked too formal. So Segal opted for curvy squares on the built-ins instead—using a half-circle trim rather than the detailed version that adorns the walls. The playful curves accentuate the desk’s (and bookcases’) rounded corners.

Make the Most Out of Imperfections

To get out of the house during quarantine, Segal’s client would traverse local antiques stores and estate sales, Zooming the designer every step of the way. Their most exciting find? A set of four vintage Italian pendant lights. The problem: They each had a different rod length. “They were clearly custom for the original owner,” Segal explains. But they were too good to pass up. 

Sixteen different configuration attempts later, the ambient lighting was wired into place. The longer lights are positioned over the desk and the sofa, where the owner would need the most direct light. The other two complete a square arrangement, illuminating the corners of the office.

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