The modern office building is almost synonymous with the madness of a soul-crushing office job. But if for some reason you find yourself missing the not-so-solid non-very-walled walls of your regular office, Panasonic is working to bring the magic of cabins to your work-from-home life with its new 88,000 yen (approximately $ 835) Komoru home block.
The Komoru is actually a bit nicer-looking than a traditional office cabinet, and it’s made of wooden pegboards (to hang things easily) with a matching, integrated desk. It is designed to blend into your existing living room or apartment setup.
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Image: Panasonic
The idea is that the Komoru will give you about one square meter (about 10 square meters) of part-off space to set as a site as a specific work area, instead of having your work life blown up for the rest of your living arrangement. The walls are only four feet high, which means it will be enough to give you some privacy when you sit at your desk, but it will not help much if you try to create a quiet zone for Zoom calls.
At the moment, Panasonic only sells the Komoru in Japan, but working from home is probably the reality for a while, so it’s easy to imagine the idea of home cabinets that also spread to the US (or through Panasonic or another company) . And why stop at just one? You could outfit an entire room with small wooden cabinets, bringing the fun of a warehouse full of endless seas of cabinets to your carefully balanced room situation as a child of distance education. It would be almost like normal times again.
