Getting away from work, at work

Ask any worker who has spent time in a cubicle: As collaborative (and thrifty) as open-plan offices may be, private spaces are crucial for a nurturing work environment.

“You want to bring people together, but people are uncomfortable being together too long,” said Nabil Sabet, group director of M Moser Associates, a workplace architecture and design firm with offices worldwide. He says he believes that while work is a place for connection, areas where employees can find “full respite from everyone else” are important for wellness.

He added that spaces supporting solitary activities, including meditation and prayer, sweeten the transition back to the office after years of remote work. “There has to be a magnetic pull,” he said. “Every company is dealing with the same thing.”

What follows are three recent projects that create buffers for workers, taking some stress out of the rat race and making it more like a … koi pond?

Womb Room

Holland Denvir, the founder of Denvir Enterprises, a brand consultancy in Los Angeles, transformed an office storage space measuring 6 by 11 feet into a shag-carpeted enclave known as the Womb Room. Seven years ago, when Denvir, who uses plural pronouns, worked as an interior designer, they would escape to their car to meditate during lunch. It was the only space that offered solitude when Denvir wanted to decompress.

“Culturally there is a movement to have more alone time,” Denvir said in a video call from the Womb Room, surrounded by bulbous shapes and bubble gum hues.

In this case, the decor preceded the theme: First came a room to relax in that was filled with brick-colored Ege carpet and pink Work in Progress beanbags (brands represented by Denvir Enterprises). The textures and colors helped inspire the idea that the space would evoke a womb. The room is shared by Laun, a design firm that collaborated with Denvir on the vision.

“It’s a full-body experience in here,” Denvir said, referring to the swirls left in the plush carpet after employees of the two companies, who typically limit their visits to an hour, compulsively rake their fingers through it. “It’s kind of like an Etch A Sketch. You can erase it and start your own design.”

Doodling aside, the space is meant to be soothing, like walking meditation without anywhere much to go.

“I am a very sensitive person, and it is nice to come into this safe, soft space and fidget with the materials around,” said Denvir, who sometimes uses it for therapy sessions or to stream videos on a laptop. “I can take difficult calls in here and feel like I am held.”

Room of Seclusion

Think of a workplace refuge as akin to noise-canceling headphones, said Tyler Noblin, a co-founder of the San Francisco architecture practice ONO. “There is such an increase of noise in the world, and not just auditory.”

His firm recently completed a hideaway inside TinkerTendo, a 10,750-square-foot corrugated metal warehouse turned into a makerspace. Tucked behind a plywood wall embedded with bits of sculpture, the room is 12 by 12 feet and furnished with a low, sprawling sofa that looks like a topographical map. An oculus glows in the ceiling – part “The Matrix,” part James Turrell.

When a room is secret or doesn’t grant easy admission, it “does change the psychology about it,” Noblin’s partner, Max Obata, said. “When you’re inside, you feel a little more protected.”

Before they created the Room of Seclusion, ONO’s founders said, it was a room of blahness, a windowless box with fluorescent lights and a whiteboard used for meetings by the former occupant, a modular-homes company.

Their client, Matt Mullenweg, wanted a space that siphoned away stimuli to make users’ inner thoughts more accessible to them. (Guests settle against the sound-absorbing nubby fabric of the green sofa, as if lounging in a mossy landscape.)

“In urban areas, we don’t realize how much ambient noise is heard all the time,” he said, describing the room as the “dry equivalent of a float tank.” In one mediation session, he recalled, the room helped him make a crucial business decision that was “fighting for conscious attention.”

The biggest luxury, he added, “is silence.”

Walden Three

For many people, putting a workspace in a home is “mixing the sacred and the profane,” said Tom Kundig of the Seattle-based architectural firm Olson Kundig. Last year, he built a postage-stamp-size hut in the backyard of a businessman’s residence on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The 70-square-foot hut is clad in red cedar and has a corrugated copper roof and a glass wall that looks out to the client’s prized Japanese garden. One of Kundig’s steampunk-style “gizmos” – a stainless-steel hand wheel – is manually turned to open a shutter, revealing the view. A piece of glass flooring cantilevers over a pond to give the feeling of floating on water.

Inside, the only furniture is a Herman Miller Renew desk and Aeron chair, and a custom red cedar cabinet.

“You can’t help but feel like you’re part of the landscape in this space,” Kundig said. Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond offered “exactly the same thing: a connection with the cosmos.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.