A Home Office Should Feel Like a Destination. Does Yours? By Lucy Carse, Twin Palms Design Studio
At Anglia Kitchens & Bedrooms, we believe bespoke cabinetry is about far more than storage. Whether we’re creating a kitchen, bedroom, dressing room or home office, every project starts with one simple goal: designing spaces that genuinely enhance the way our clients live, work and feel every single day.
That’s why we’re so excited to welcome Lucy, founder of Twin Palms Design Studio, as a guest writer on our blog. Based in Norwich, Lucy is bringing a fresh approach to interior design across Norfolk with her distinctive mid-century inspired aesthetic and psychology-led design philosophy. Her work combines colour psychology, biophilic design and beautifully considered styling to create interiors that not only look exceptional but positively influence how we experience our homes.
For one of our recent bespoke home office projects, Lucy took the beautiful craftsmanship and cabinetry created by our team and reimagined the space through her own creative lens, demonstrating how thoughtful interior design can transform a functional room into somewhere you’ll genuinely want to spend time.
If you’ve ever wondered why your home office doesn’t inspire you, or how colour, lighting and styling can completely change the way you work from home, this is a fascinating read.
Over to Lucy…
We need to talk about your home office. Not the aspirational one living rent-free in a Pinterest board you haven’t touched in years. The actual room you’re currently working in. More than likely, it was a spare bedroom, hastily converted, furnished with whatever chair was to hand and still decked out in emulsion white. The room where you sit for hours a day, feel vaguely oppressed by, and escape from the moment you can.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you when they sell you the dream of working from home: the space you work in isn’t just a backdrop. It’s actively shaping how you think, how stressed you feel, and how creative you’re able to be. And most home offices are quietly, consistently working against you.
I’m Lucy, designer at Twin Palms Design Studio in Norwich, a psychology-led interior design studio specialising in spaces that feel as good as they look. My work sits at the intersection of colour psychology, biophilic design, and what I think of as the “mise en scene” of a room: the idea that every great interior tells a story about the person who lives in it. I’ve partnered with Anglia Kitchens and Bedrooms to bring that thinking to one of their lovely home offices, along with my retro-modern, layered aesthetic, to show what happens when beautiful bespoke cabinetry meets a genuinely considered design vision.
The Problem With “Functional
The dominant logic of home office design has always been function first, everything else is a distant afterthought. Ergonomic chair. Adequate desk. Decent monitor. Job done.
But neuroscience and environmental psychology have been quietly building a compelling case that this is completely backwards. The way a space looks and feels directly influences your cognitive state, your ability to focus, to think expansively, to recover between tasks, to actually want to be there.
A room that feels harsh, visually noisy, or emotionally cold creates low-level stress responses that compound over hours. It’s not dramatic. You won’t notice it happening in the moment. But you’ll feel it in your shoulders by 3pm, in your motivation on Thursday morning, in the way you describe your relationship with work to your friends at the weekend.
The home office deserves better thinking. And it’s capable of so much more.
The Brief: Beautiful Bones, Brought to Life
AKB installed a bespoke home office with genuinely exceptional bones: gorgeous floor-to-ceiling cabinetry, a generous wrap-around desk in warm oak, quality brass hardware throughout. The structural investment was already there. My role was to bring my particular aesthetic and design psychology lens to the space: to imagine who might want to live and create here, and to build a room around that person.
Think less “corporate productivity pod,” more “creative director’s private study.” Someone for whom work and life aren’t neatly separable. Someone who might have a glass of whiskey on the desk at 7pm and genuinely enjoys being in their office. That’s the character I designed for, and every decision flowed from that.
Colour as foundation: Pickled Olive by Rust-Oleum
The first and most significant decision was colour drenching the entire room “walls, ceiling, woodwork” in Rust-Oleum’s Pickled Olive. Not a safe greige. Not a hedging neutral. A genuine, committed, warm olive green that means something.
Here’s why this colour does serious psychological work in a home office specifically. Olive sits at the intersection of two deeply stabilising colour families: the grounding warmth of ochre and amber, and the restorative calm of green. In colour psychology, greens are consistently linked to what researchers call restorative attention the kind that replenishes rather than depletes. Unlike the cool, high-contrast tones that dominate productivity-focused spaces, olive signals focus without anxiety. It’s the colour of deep thinking rather than clinical productivity.
Colour drenching amplifies this effect. When walls, ceiling and trim share one tone, the eye stops searching for edges and the brain settles. Visual noise drops. The room stops feeling like a container and starts feeling like an embrace.
Layered lighting: the detail that changes everything
One of the most common and most damaging errors in home office design is single-source overhead lighting. One light, directly above, doing all the work, creating harsh shadows, high contrast, and an atmosphere that sits somewhere between “interrogation room” and “waiting room.” Not exactly conducive to your best thinking.
This redesign introduces layered lighting across three distinct registers. A warm sculptural pendant provides warm, diffused overhead light with personality rather than just function. An LED strip under the floating shelf throws focused task light directly onto the desk surface – practical, purposeful, and with a lovely warm glow that spills across your work. And in the corner, a sunset floor lamp creates the soft, warm, almost amber light that makes a room feel genuinely serene in the evenings – essential in a Norfolk winter when the light is gone by half three and you need your office to feel like a refuge rather than a fluorescent obligation.
Each light source serves a different moment in the working day. Together they make the room feel alive.
Biophilic design: softening the boundary between inside and out
The room’s two windows onto the garden are a genuine asset: real daylight, a green view, a connection to the outside world that every home office should be maximising. The design leans into this rather than competing with it. Deep rust velvet Roman blinds frame rather than block the windows, softening the hard edge between inside and outside while bringing warmth, texture, and that all-important sense of cocooned intimacy without closing the garden off entirely.
Biophilic design — the practice of incorporating natural references and connections into interior spaces — has a real basis in evidence for reducing cortisol levels and improving cognitive restoration. The burl wood cabinetry finish works within this framework too: those swirling organic grain patterns reference the fractal geometries found in nature, the same visual language as leaves, water, and weathered stone that we are neurologically primed to find calming and restorative.
Nature doesn’t need to mean houseplants everywhere (though a good plant never hurt anyone). It means making deliberate design choices that connect a space to the organic, the warm, and the living.
The mise en scene: who lives here?
Every great room has a character. The styling in this redesign – black and white automotive prints, sculptural objects with warmth and weight, the amber tones of the glassware, the tortoiseshell tray – these aren’t decorative gestures. They’re the details that make a space feel inhabited rather than installed. That make you walk in and think: someone interesting works here.
What This Means For Your Home Office
If your home office is making you feel bored, distracted, or just like you’d rather be anywhere else, the answer isn’t a new print or a cable tidy. It’s a more considered rethink of the whole space.
AKB provides the bones: the precision-made cabinetry, the bespoke joinery, the hardware that still looks beautiful a decade later. Twin Palms brings the story: the colour intelligence, the layered atmosphere, the sense of a room that was designed for a specific, stylish version of your life.
Together, that’s a home office worth coming back to.
Twin Palms Design Studio is a Norwich-based, psychology-led interior design studio founded by Lucy, specialising in premium e-design for design-savvy clients who deserve chic and elevated spaces, even without a six-figure renovation. Twin Palms is proud to be partnering with Anglia Kitchens and Bedrooms to bring this thinking to bespoke home spaces across Norfolk and beyond.
