Carefully crafted office furniture

That has meant office furniture manufacturers have had to rethink their product portfolios and provide more flexible options than the cubicle walls they've sold for the past four decades. Otherwise, the initial cost savings will be obliterated by higher costs down the road. What’s more, given the lack of moving parts in most pieces of office furniture, there’s no reason well-built ones shouldn’t last for decades.

These let you screw and unscrew the piece multiple times, accommodating moves and changes, without the screw hole disintegrating. As a starting point, look for features that contribute to furniture longevity, says Johnson.

It's at this point that we should all sit back for a second and take a lesson from Don Woodruff. He has a three-person popular designs wooden office table in Pittsfield, Maine called Homeworks, and he's created a successful company building home office furniture based on one of the simplest designs imaginable: the library table.

Belgian superior quality office table Bulo has a deep line of compact desks in its M2 collection, so named for its one-square-meter shape. The desk, which comes in multiple colors, features a worktable which is attached to and extends sideways from a simple storage unit. It's big enough for a desktop, but also can be used as a multipurpose work area.