At Bklyn Designs: Robert Martin Designs’ Office Desk

Robert Martin Designs’ Office Desk, which you will find under “Office” as “Desk” on their website, may seem simple, but it’s more complex than its name might suggest.

At 72 L x 24 W x 30 H, this Desk is just the right size. If you’re wondering where to put everything, have no fear: the drawers are customized for your desires, whether they be technological or otherwise. Robert Martin Designs claims the drawers “accommodate keyboard and mouse pad needs or pen, paper, and accessory storage.” Or for those Luddites out there, this Desk might hold your antique typewriter (yes, some people still like keys clicking and keys embossing), a row of freshly sharpened pencils, a variety of fountain pens, ink pots, and some hand-made stationary. For those technophiles, the Desk might showcase your wide-screen imac, ergonomic mouse, and wireless keyboard (I’d advise you never to spill beer on it, which accident rather deadens the accuracy–trust me, I know).

Office Desk. Designed by Robert Martin Designs.

Like the company’s “landscape architecturals,” perhaps the office design’s better-known cousins (they’ve come to tea at Garden Design and Interior Design), the Desk is perfectly crafted with an attention to detail that could possibly indicate Mr. Martin’s need for therapy. Available with or without casters and in a wide variety of American woods—mesquite, pecan, rift cherry, walnut, rift white oak, vertical grain heart pine, and my favorite, wormy chestnut (reminds me of absinthe for some reason)—the Desk also offers practical inset panels in matte black canvas-laminated phenolic or acid-etched glass. Desk is structural enough to recall the Brooklyn Navy Yard, location of Robert Martin Designs’ showroom, and refined enough to slip uptown. It’s likely that the Brooklyn Bridge has influenced Robert Martin Designs via suggestion or osmosis—because his work has the same ideal combination of sound construction and beautiful silhouette.

Leave a Reply