In a one-bedroom flat the desk goes in the bedroom alcove or on the wall beside the bedroom window, and if neither exists, behind the sofa. A 100cm-wide desk fits all three. The test for any spot isn’t what it looks like. It’s whether you can sit at it with the top of the screen at eye level and the keyboard just below your elbows, because that’s what turns a corner into somewhere you can work a full day.
The four spots below are ranked by whether you can meet the HSE posture line at them, and then by what you see from the sofa.
The posture test first
The Health and Safety Executive publishes what a workstation should look like, and it’s short enough to check any spot in the flat against. The HSE posture guidance says: “Top of screen level with eyes, about an arm’s length away”, “Keyboard just below elbow height”, and for prolonged laptop use, a keyboard and mouse “separate from the laptop so screen can be elevated on a laptop riser or similar”. I’d assumed this was a company HR thing. It’s a government page, and it applies to a laptop on a kitchen table just the same.
Three consequences for a small flat. You need a chair whose height you can set, so a dining chair is out for anything longer than a morning. You need a surface deep enough to put the screen an arm’s length away, which is roughly 50cm of desk plus your forearms; a 30cm shelf won’t do. And if you work on a laptop, you need a riser, a separate keyboard and a mouse, so you need somewhere to keep those three things when the desk isn’t a desk.
A spot that can’t meet those three is a spot for paying bills and answering email. It isn’t a spot for a working day.
Spot one: the bedroom alcove or the wall beside the window
Most one-bed flats have a chimney breast or a wardrobe that leaves an alcove between 100cm and 120cm wide, or a stretch of wall between the window and a corner of about the same size. It’s the best spot in the flat for one reason: you can close the door on it.
A 100cm-wide desk fits. The one I’d pick as a typical example is the size of the Casablanca desk at Dunelm: 75cm high, 100cm wide, 50cm deep, three drawers, flat pack. Seventy-five is a standard desk height, 50cm gives the arm’s length the HSE wants, and the drawers are where the keyboard, mouse and riser go at half past five.
Put it side-on to the window rather than facing it, so daylight falls across the screen instead of behind or onto it. The window wall is also where the radiator usually is; leave a gap so the desk doesn’t sit against it.
If you’re in a flatshare, this is usually the only spot there is, because your room is the flat. The same desk size and the same posture rules apply; it just makes the last section, about packing the desk away, compulsory rather than nice to have.
The cost of this spot is that you’re working in the bedroom, and it needs the discipline in the last section to stop the bedroom turning into an office with a bed in it.
Photo: Antonio Borriello via Pexels
Spot two: behind the sofa
If the sofa isn’t against a wall, the space behind it is a desk-shaped gap. A 100cm by 50cm desk pushed against the back of a sofa looks like a console table from the room and works as a desk from the chair.
It passes the posture test: full-depth surface, room for a proper chair. It fails the other test, which is what you see from the sofa. You see the monitor. You see the chair. You see the charger cable. Working in the same room you relax in is fine at 11am and grim at 9pm.
It works better for a couple where one person works from home and the other is out, and where the desk has drawers so the surface is bare by evening. It works worst in a living room that’s also the dining room, because the chair ends up borrowed for dinner.
Spot three: the hallway or landing, if wide enough to pass
Some one-beds have a hallway wide enough for a desk against one wall with room to walk past. This one is for people living alone or with a partner; in a shared house the hallway is everyone’s and nobody wants to pass your chair on the way to the bathroom. The number I’d go by is the one in Approved Document M, the building regulations for new homes: a corridor of “900 (when approached head on)”, in millimetres. Take the desk depth off your hallway width. If what’s left is under about 90cm you’ll be squeezing past your own chair with the shopping.
Where it fits, the hallway is a genuinely good spot. It’s out of both rooms, it has no window so no glare, and a desk with drawers doubles as the place keys and post land. It’s often the coldest part of the flat and the darkest, so budget for a lamp and a rug.
Check the fire escape route. The desk and chair can’t be allowed to narrow the way from the bedroom to the front door.
Spot four: a fold-down or drop-leaf when nothing else fits
When the alcove is a wardrobe, the sofa is against the wall and the hallway is 80cm wide, the desk has to disappear. Two options.
A wall-mounted fold-down desk, which is a hinged flap on a batten. Great when up, gone when down, but it needs proper fixings into the wall and the landlord’s permission, and it has no drawers, so the keyboard and riser need a home elsewhere. It also fails the posture test if the flap is shallower than about 50cm.
A freestanding drop-leaf table or a gateleg, which folds to 30 or 40cm and stands against a wall. No holes, no permission, and the same table can be the dining table at the weekend. The compromise is that it’s a table, not a desk, so it’s a bit high or a bit low for the chair, and you should measure the folded size against the wall it will live on before buying.
I’d take the drop-leaf every time in a rented flat. The fold-down desk is the better desk; the drop-leaf is the better tenant.
Making it disappear at half past five
Whichever spot, the desk only stays tolerable if the working day ends visibly. The routine is three minutes.
Monitor off, or laptop closed and off the riser. Laptop, keyboard, mouse and riser into the top drawer. Chair pushed fully in. Any paper on the surface into the tray that gets sorted on Sunday, which is the whole of the paper and admin filing system and what stops the desk vanishing under post.
The surface should be bare. A bare desk in a bedroom is a dressing table; a desk with a monitor on it is an office.
One more thing on budget. Don’t plan to offset the desk with the home-working tax relief, because it has gone. GOV.UK states: “From the tax year 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027, you will not be able to claim tax relief for working from home.” Before that the flat rate was “£6 a week”, worth £1.20 a week to a basic-rate taxpayer, which was never going to buy a chair anyway. Your employer may still contribute to equipment; ask.
Zoning one room into a place to work and a place to sleep is the same problem a studio has with one fewer wall, and dividing a studio is covered separately. The rest of the small-spaces articles cover what else has to fit around the desk.
