From mazes of cubicles to plentiful lush balconies , office designers keep re-envisioning spaces to support our professional lives. Not all of their ideas have been…work-friendly, shall we say.

We thought it would be productive to ask the workers themselves—in this case Wall Street Journal readers—for a little brainstorming to see what their employers could be doing better.

We asked, What office-design change would you most like to see?

Their responses covered a lot of ground, from workplace conventions to technology to the environment itself.

Put your phones away

Similar to a lunch break, I wish we could have a phone break each day. Staff members would place their phones in a box that would then be removed and face-to-face conversation would be encouraged instead.

This is an important cognitive disconnect. People are responding more slowly to face-to-face conversations as their minds alternate between concentrating on their device and in-real-life interactions.

This no-device speakeasy would be less structured around work and more like a hangout: Someone just kicks off a conversation and folks follow on.

• Desmond Latham, Pearly Beach, Western Cape, South Africa

No hoteling

One way companies could make the return to office smoother would be to have assigned offices and desks.

Having a consistent space provides employees with stability and a sense of belonging, rather than navigating the uncertainty of finding a spot each day.

• Gabriela Valdez, Prosper, Texas

Some place like home

I would like to see office buildings that blend seamlessly into residential neighbourhoods. I

nstead of towering corporate headquarters in city centers, companies would operate from house-like suites scattered across communities.

Employees could walk to work, bring their children or pets along, and enjoy flexible hours without the grind of daily commuting.

Walls would be lined with immersive video screens, allowing teams across the country to collaborate as if they were in the same room.

This model could save trillions in transportation costs, road construction and pollution while offering workers a healthier and more affordable lifestyle.

By eliminating the need for massive skyscrapers, corporations would redirect capital into smaller, interconnected hubs that foster community integration.

The environmental benefits are equally striking: fewer cars on the road, reduced emissions, and less strain on public infrastructure.

• Michael Lowery, Colorado Springs, Colo.

One size doesn’t fit all

I’d like to see a focus on the actual employees.

Why aren’t employers asking them what spaces they need to do the most productive work?

What environments are most conducive to enjoying the work they do? Private offices aren’t the answer for everyone but most workers need more than a traditional cubicle.

Same with artwork and furnishings. One size or style isn’t appealing to everyone.

• Nancy Sanders, Phoenix

Quiet, please

I want an actual functioning cone of silence at work. This would be used so workers that are on conference calls for many hours every day don’t disturb their co-workers with all of their talking.

At many firms, offices with hard walls and doors are only assigned to managers with a minimum number of direct reports.

I think they should be assigned instead based on how many hours a day the person is on conference calls.

And that’s not for the benefit of the projects they manage but for everyone else who otherwise has to listen to one side of a conversation for four to six hours a day.

I know many companies are enthusiastic about open-office plans, but I don’t know any engineers who like them, so many have no choice but to wear headphones and play music to drown out the distractions, which leads to isolation even in a well-populated office.

• Paul Egan, Milwaukee

Private time

I’m gobsmacked that there is no mention of bathrooms in these stories about future office design. If you want to get employees back to an office, offer more privacy there.

• Lisa Hale, Los Angeles

Double down on fitness

Standing desks are passé if not accompanied by an under desk treadmill.

• Taylor Archibald, Provo, Utah

Bring back the cubicle

I’d like to see a return to cubicles or small alcove-style workspaces and a step away from the fully open-office concept.

Open layouts were meant to spark collaboration, but in practice they often create constant noise, distractions and a sense of being “on display.”

Most knowledge work requires periods of sustained focus, and people do their best thinking when they have a bit of privacy and control over their environment.

Cubicles and alcoves don’t eliminate teamwork, but simply give employees a dedicated space to concentrate, recharge and hold quiet conversations without disrupting others.

When combined with designated collaboration zones, these semiprivate spaces create a healthy balance between focus and teamwork.

In a hybrid-work world, the office should be a place that enhances productivity and restoring a sense of personal space would help achieve that.

• James Wright, Grand Rapids, Mich.

A little colour

I’d love to see the addition of some colour. Any colour at all besides gray and beige. I’ve worked in offices for most of my life, and the “grayge” neutrals are suffocating.

I would also like to have more powered standing desks in the office. The hand-operated ones are too complicated or too fragile to allow for regular lifting and lowering. Every one I’ve had has broken.

• Tony Holmes, Prince William County, Va.

Keep us moving

I wish we had more flex space.

That would be where office designers create a variety of workspaces: standing desks, treadmill desks, quiet rooms, lounge areas, etc., so the team can move through different ergonomic worksites throughout the day and keep their bodies and minds flexible and active.

• Sam McNulty, Cleveland

Help us want to be there

I believe that companies should focus on how to make the workplace more comfortable, even homey.

We spend more of our time at the office than we do awake at home. The office therefore should be a place that one looks forward to going to.

This could be achieved with upholstery that shows the company cares that you’re there.

Comfortable chairs and desks, up-to-date technology, a subsidized kitchen and a dining room that invites collaboration and connection between co-workers.

• Andre Mora, Miami

Restorative options

We need nap areas, like pods or mini-bedrooms as well as gym and shower areas.

• Sara Jones, Hillsborough, N.C.

Let it shine

Get the private offices with doors away from the perimeter windows! Move those offices to the interior of the floor plates so more light can flood the workspace and everyone can look out the windows!

Our office was reworked this way and our copy/print/supply area ended up along a perimeter window.

Everyone looks outside while they wait for the print jobs to finish.

We also used low-rise desks so it’s possible to look out the perimeter windows from the private offices.

Our private offices are glass-doored and glass-walled, so there’s a lot of visibility throughout our offices.

• Andrew Skotdal, Everett, Wash.

The ultimate perk

I’m hoping for a coffee-delivery drone robot that lets me stay on a two-hour call without a BRB (Be Right Back) coffee break.

• John Dabbar, Oyster Bay, N.Y.

Four years ago, with my adult daughters gone from the nest, it was time for me to fly, too. And even though I had never set foot in Portugal, I decided to retire to Lisbon.

It has paid off spectacularly.

I was a director of marketing and communications at a public university and 55 years old when I retired.

Around that time, there was a lot of publicity about Americans, especially older single women like myself, moving to Portugal.

It remains one of the easiest places in the European Union to gain citizenship after five years of temporary residency (though a proposed law would double that to 10 years and add other requirements for most foreigners).

Portugal checked other boxes for me, too: It’s safe and affordable, a good base for travel, the U.S. is reachable within six hours from the East Coast, and the culture and natural beauty provide a wonderful environment.

The life I have created here has exceeded all of my expectations. I am more active and have deeper friendships than ever before.

The best part is the vast community of friends I have cultivated—mostly Americans, but also some from countries around the world.

They all make living here a lot of fun. Almost daily there is some kind of social event I can join, whether it is visiting museums or attending concerts, going to the beach or hiking.

I started a hiking group two years ago that now has 65 members. We explore historic and natural sights in Lisbon and nearby, including the breathtaking hills nestling the palaces of Sintra.

Changing apartments

Not everything has been smooth sailing. Before arriving, I signed an apartment lease to qualify for a temporary visa.

But after I settled in, it became clear that lots of nice apartments with lower rents were available.

So, after the first year, I moved to Almada, across the Tagus River. The money I saved on rent helped pad my budget for travel.

There was just one problem: Across the river, I felt a bit isolated from my friends.

Now I am closer to central Lisbon in a comfortable one-bedroom second-floor walk-up in a neighborhood with a lot of stores and restaurants.

There is a park where locals gather to listen to music and have a drink or watch their kids play together. I pay the equivalent of about $1,000 in rent and roughly $160 to $215 a month for electricity, water, gas and internet.

And I have a great view of the famed 25th of April Bridge and the towering Christ the King (Cristo Rei) statue that overlooks the city.

Like many apartment dwellers here, I don’t have central air or heating. The climate is comfortable without either, except for a few weeks in January when I use a space heater.

In the summer, I have a portable air-conditioning unit but so far I haven’t had to use it. There is also no dishwasher and no dryer. I use a clothesline on the balcony and a laundromat nearby in case I have an urgent need to dry things.

Delicious fresh fruits, vegetables and fish are all available from my local shopkeepers.

Frequently, I meet friends for lunch or dinner. I love the seafood here. The sea bass and bream are always tasty.

My favourite meal is gambas à guilho: shrimp sautéed in garlic and olive oil. Meals at a typical Portuguese restaurant can cost as little as $12-$15 for soup, an entree, coffee and dessert.

Sometimes I miss having a car, but it’s easy to get around on public transportation. For a little over $46 a month, I have access to every bus, train, tram and ferry within 30 miles.

To go farther within Portugal and Spain there are inexpensive buses and trains. Flights within Europe and to Northern Africa also are affordable, depending on the season.

I have visited Austria, Hungary, Morocco and Jordan, and I’ve visited the U.K, Spain and Italy multiple times in the past four years.

Next year, I will take my three daughters to Turkey for my 60th birthday! I belong to a pet-sitting/home-swap group, so my accommodations are frequently free; I only have to pay to get to the location.

Most of my airfares have ranged between about $110 and $215.

The price of healthcare

Another important thing I had to consider when moving here was healthcare.

Even with a pre-existing condition, I was able to purchase excellent private insurance for about $1,840 a year, and I have had good experiences with the private healthcare system.

A public hospital, however, supplies free medication for my autoimmune disease.

My life here isn’t without its downsides. Rising rents are an issue and have forced a number of friends to move.

I have considered buying an apartment, but ones that I would consider—those requiring no major work—start at well over $380,000, which is more than I want to spend.

Also, apartments here commonly have “paper thin” walls and floors. Everyone has stories about noisy neighbours.

When I moved into my first apartment, I was so worried about making noise that I gave my downstairs neighbours my number to call if I was ever too loud.

They thanked me but said, “Noise is to be expected…don’t worry about it.” In my current apartment building, two out of the five apartments are vacant and I rarely see my neighbours.

The only complaint is noise above my bedroom in the middle of the night. Fortunately lately, that has become less of an issue.

Learning Portuguese has been a bit of a struggle. I have taken classes for more than two years, and technically, I have passed the B1 level course, but speaking in public is frightening to me and therefore locals sometimes still have trouble understanding me.

Thankfully, the Portuguese people are kind and no matter how badly I bomb when trying to speak, they always praise my attempt and encourage me to keep trying.

And when I greet people in my neighbourhood by name and ask about their day, it continues to make my connection here stronger.

I plan to apply for Portuguese citizenship, though I still consider myself an American and always will. Neither Portugal nor the U.S. requires sole citizenship.

I have only been back to the U.S. twice: for my youngest’s college graduation and for my eldest’s wedding.

My daughters have always encouraged me to live the life I want, and they love to tell their friends their mom moved to Portugal.

My youngest has been here once, and the middle daughter, who goes to college in England, has been here twice.

All of my daughters and my son-in-law will be coming to visit me for Christmas this year, and I am ecstatic.

If my daughters lived here with me, I would consider my life here perfect.

For generations of women, the logic has seemed airtight: Focus on a career in your 20s, and worry about starting a family once you are established in a job.

This mindset has catapulted women into higher-earning positions, and into traditionally male-dominated fields.

The share of women in their prime working years who are in the workforce is around a record high. And women are having babies later, if they have them at all. The answer to fertility constraints, they’re told, is egg freezing.

Isabel Brown , 28, didn’t want to wait. She married last year and had a baby this year. She’s now building her career as a conservative activist, hosting a podcast for conservative media company the Daily Wire and speaking on college campuses as a representative for Turning Point, the youth organisation Charlie Kirk co-founded.

Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk , now leads the organisation and is amplifying a message especially resonant for young conservative women: Family is central. Children come first.

“Young people are realising that our lives are going to be so much more meaningful if we have a family to share our success with from the start,” Brown said. She and other conservative women talk about timing family and work as “seasons” of life.

The term is from the biblical passage Ecclesiastes 3:1: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Many of the women who view their lives in this way say they think of themselves as existing in between the extremes of tradwives (who treat caring for their homes and families as a more permanent, full-time job) and girlbosses (who centre their lives around work).

As recently as 15 years ago, self-described conservative and liberal women between the ages of 18 and 35 were having children at around the same rate, according to an analysis from a large national study called the General Social Survey by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma.

But in recent years, the gap has widened, his analysis shows. As of 2024, roughly 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared with around 40% of conservatives. In 2010, the difference was only 5 percentage points.

“Liberals are leaning hard into being DINKs (Dual Income No Kids), being childless or having fewer kids, and it being very much a choice, whereas for conservatives having kids is still very much a part of what it means to be a whole person,” Perry said.

Having kids doesn’t preclude workforce participation, and plenty of liberals are still putting a priority on parenthood. But as birth and marriage rates fall, some conservatives are doubling down on the importance of starting a family.

“If you decide to not work or not lean in in the first 10 years of being a mom and you do that in your 20s, there’s still plenty of time to start working in your 30s and have a meaningful career,” said Carrie Lukas , the president of Independent Women, a right-leaning public policy organisation focused on women’s economic issues.

At a conference for conservative college women in Scottsdale, Ariz., last month, speaker after speaker (including Brown) encouraged the 100 gathered women ages 18 to 22 to pursue careers and education—but not at the expense of marriage and children.

Reagan Conrad, who hosts “The Comments Section” podcast for the Daily Wire, discouraged egg freezing. “If we as women are putting our eggs on ice for a decade to make sure that our career is thriving,” she said, “we have a prioritisation problem.”

K.T. McFarland talked about leaving her job in public affairs at the Pentagon at 34 to raise five kids and deciding to return to the workforce after 9/11, when she was 50. The former Fox News analyst served as President Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term.

Kimberly Begg , president of the nonprofit Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, which was hosting the event, told the audience that Gen Z is the “loneliest generation” because members of that demographic group are a part of smaller and more fractured families.

Begg also said that they have been told lies such as “faith and family hold you back.”

The 49-year-old says she regrets putting her travel-heavy job as general counsel of a nonprofit over the needs of her five young kids earlier in her career.

“One of my daughters learned how to use the phone and she called me constantly because she wanted me to come home,” Begg said in an interview after the conference. “My children were not thriving.”

She decided to quit that role after seeing how the big-eyed Beanie Babies she brought home as souvenirs for her daughter after each work trip had taken over her room.

After five years at home, during which time she wrote two nonfiction books and advised nonprofits, Begg joined the Luce Center in 2024.

A few months after she became president, she shifted the in-person office hours—which they call “collaboration hours”—to end at 2 p.m. to accommodate mothers picking their kids up from school and other family priorities.

“Children and marriages and families need more than just loving thoughts,” said Begg. “They need presence. And these hours allow me to be present with my children while I’m engaging in meaningful work.”

She encourages the students she mentors to look for the flexible work arrangements that have become more common postpandemic. (Though they can come with drawbacks for career advancement and pay.)

“You can have everything you want,” Begg says. “But you can’t have it all at once.”

Grace De Mars , a 21-year-old senior at California Baptist University who attended the conference, recently got engaged to her high school boyfriend.

She has been trying to reconcile her aspirations to become a history teacher with her desire to start a family in her mid-20s. Her mother, who had her at 39, warned her about how much harder that late pregnancy was than her previous three.

“I have to come to terms with what’s more important for our children and for our family,” said De Mars. “Especially as a teacher, it’s not like I can just clock out and go home and not take my work with me.”

As a young mother and policy analyst working remotely for conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, 28-year-old Emma Waters is both living and researching the seasons approach.

She left a fast-paced, coalition-building role when she and her husband decided to have children so that she could be home with them—now ages 2½ and 11 months—during the day. Since then, she says she’s turned down other in-person career opportunities she would have otherwise enjoyed.

“I love my work, but my top priority is to raise my children, and that cannot be outsourced to someone else for eight hours a day, five days a week,” said Waters. “The ‘you can have it all’ mindset is so misleading and sets women up for disappointment.”

She knows that not every woman can work remotely, and that living on a single salary isn’t an option for many families. She also doesn’t prescribe her family’s approach as a singular ideal, acknowledging that seasons look different for everyone.

In her work as a policy analyst, she is advocating for “more financial support for married, working families in particular alongside the social support systems we have in place for single-parent families already.”

Mostly, however, she thinks it is the culture that needs to change to make it easier for people to fit their work around their families, rather than the other way around.

“The answer is more community support to find flexible work for young mothers,” Waters said.

In posts to her roughly 2 million mostly young Instagram and TikTok followers, Turning Point representative Brown asks: Why wait for marriage and parenthood? “It’s not true that walking down the aisle or welcoming a child into the world will somehow limit your personal freedom,” she said.

Brown records her show for the Daily Wire from her house in Washington, D.C., and often brings her daughter to the speaking engagements she travels to all over the country.

Her husband, Brock Belcher , who works in communications for the Trump administration, shares child-care responsibilities for their daughter Isla “with the exception of breast-feeding,” Brown joked.

Their experience as a young family, Brown said, differs from the message she thinks a lot of young people see about how they should structure their lives.

“We are looking around at the antifamily state of affairs in our country,” Brown said, “and realising that, for the most part, people aren’t happy or fulfilled.”

Play, a four-year-old French bulldog, waddled down the street in Noho. Squinting in the morning sun, she had bat ears, a downturned mouth and the mien of a pissed-off mother-in-law.

“People tell me she’s ugly all the time,” said her owner Nakisha Lewis, 41, a stylist and impact strategist. “I think the little round face is absolutely adorable…but every parent thinks their baby is adorable.”

You can’t go around calling human babies ugly, but thankfully the rules are more lax with dogs.

I’ve been patrolling downtown Manhattan to find singularly unattractive breeds—then asking their owners why they chose them. (I haven’t asked if any believe the urban legend that dogs resemble their masters.)

As a superficial snob who grew up with golden retrievers that deserved Pantene commercials, I had to know: Why are we so into ugly dogs now?

In recent years, man’s best friend has plummeted from a 10 to a 2. Sure, you see lots of gorgeous doodles, but at the end of every second leash lurks a rat with an overbite or a popeyed goblin with ears so monstrous they make King Charles III’s seem not that big.

French bulldogs lead the charge for character-actor canines.

Celebs cradle the Yodalike pups, and millennials love them even more than a tasteful beige wall.

For 31 years Labradors topped the American Kennel Club’s purebred rankings, which are based on more than one million annual registrations.

But since 2022 Frenchies have been top dog, with Labs and golden retrievers settling for silver and bronze. It’s like the quarterback and homecoming queen losing a popularity contest to a wheezing weirdo.

Dr. Carly Fox, a senior veterinarian at New York’s Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, said that flat-faced dogs—they’re “brachycephalic” for people in the know—have been ascendant in the past decade.

Other popular members of this snub-nosed club include English bulldogs, Boston terriers, pugs and Brussels griffons.

A rival gang—more niche but no prettier—is the rat pack.

Think chihuahuas, hairless xoloitzcuintles and Chinese cresteds, a mostly hairless breed with wispy tufts on its head that the American Kennel Club called a “mover and shaker” and I call “a dog that got left in the microwave.”

This summer, a Chinese crested in a pink gown shivered through a starring role in Lena Dunham’s Netflix show “Too Much.”

The Victorians sparked the modern obsession with engineering “lots of different looking dogs to fit different human wants,” said Dr. Rowena Packer, senior lecturer at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College.

The malleability of the dog genome allows for enormous physical variety, she explained, meaning that breeders can push features to extremes—squashing snouts, piling on wrinkles.

To evaluate a dog’s alterations, said Packer, consider how much it deviates from the original archetype: the wolf. I’d wager a wolf would sooner recognize a sheep as one of its own than a grinning pug.

Hal Herzog, a professor emeritus of psychology at Western Carolina University who studies human-animal relationships, said dog breeds become popular in the same way fashion trends do.

We look to movies and celebrities and, above all, copy each other. Chance plays a huge role in a breed going viral, he said, but it helps to have some inherent appeal.

The allure of wackadoo breeds? For starters, most skew small. That suits postpandemic demand for apartment dogs that can also travel, said Paula Fasseas, founder of PAWS Chicago, a no-kill animal welfare organisation.

But the big draw of brachycephalic (brachy) dogs is their cheek-squeezing cuteness.

When owners gushed that their Frenchies and pugs resembled human babies, I took offense on behalf of all parents.

Yet studies show that flat-faced dogs possess “kindchenschema” or “baby schema,” a term coined by ethologist Konrad Lorenz to describe infantile features that elicit caregiving reactions.

With wide eyes, small noses and bigger, rounder heads, a brachy dog’s face “is far more human than, say, a Labrador’s,” said Packer.

Those looks come at a high cost. Packer said that Frenchies, pugs and English bulldogs are more prone to chronic eye disease, skin-fold infections and spinal problems, as well as breathing issues caused by truncated airways—and exacerbated by faces that are often flatter than in the past.

Fox, the vet, owns a Frenchie but called extreme brachy breeds “nightmares” from a medical perspective. (Love the look? Packer recommends a healthier mix like a jack russell-pug, the superbly named “jug.”)

Some experts argue that brachy dogs’ health problems can make them more desirable to owners.

Authorities such as James Serpell have suggested that these dogs’ neediness brings out our maternal instincts, Herzog noted.

Forget about throwing a stick; as one young woman told me while her wet-nosed darling relieved himself in the park, you must wipe a Frenchie’s butt . Packer called this phenomenon “the parentification of dogs.”

The oversharing park-goer compared her Frenchie to a Labubu.

A cynic might say that, like those hideous-slash-adorable dolls, brachy pups are a trendy accessory for young urbanites to parade about and post on Instagram. Less debatable: Like those grinning monsters, dogs with scrunched faces are hilarious.

“There’s a tragicomedy aspect” to Frenchies’ appearance, said the Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, who owns a rescue, Colette.

“They look like something out of a Cervantes novel…they have this lost soul thing.” They also remind him of the late comic actor Marty Feldman, whose googly eyes shot off in different directions.

“They’re not beautiful like a greyhound,” he added, “but, you know, we’re not dating dogs.”

A Frenchie owner expects to field compliments like, “Oh my god, that’s hysterical,” said Will Thrun, 27, who works in finance. At a Halloween dog parade in the East Village, Poppy, Thrun’s Frenchie, lay in the sun dressed as a taco while the ancestral gray wolves howled in their graves.

Elias Weiss Friedman, who shares his photos of New York dogs with the nearly 8 million followers on his Instagram account, the Dogist, said people increasingly want pooches that stand out.

A weirdo dog lets you “show your individuality,” said Terence Nelson, 38, an influencer marketing strategist in New York whose fuzzy Brussels griffon, Sue, is a dead ringer for an Ewok. (I kept my mouth shut when Frenchie owners praised their dogs’ “uniqueness” with literally dozens of other Frenchies snorting about nearby.)

Brian Lee, founder of Way of the Dog, a dog-behaviour program in Southern California, offers another explanation for the prevalence of odd-looking pups: the rise in rescue-dog adoptions. People may think “I want to help this innocent animal” rather than focus on looks, said Lee.

When people call Eve-Marie Kuijstermans’s dog ugly she considers it a compliment. Edgar Allan Pup (“Eddie”), her Chinese crested-chihuahua mix, is mostly hairless, with old-mannish tufts on his head.

“He could be 100 years old,” said Kuijstermans. (He’s five.) “Kids are very confused by him,” added the 41-year-old SVP for a communications firm.

Lately, Kuijstermans has spotted more Brussels griffons, Chinese cresteds and “interesting mixes”—a revenge-of-the-nerds backlash to the flocks of fluffy doodles.

“For me, Eddie’s cuteness lies in the fact that he’s kind of a weird little guy,” she said, as her pooch scrambled onto my knee to survey the dog park.

Suddenly, this golden-retriever lifer began to fall for a sweet little thing as cuddly as a broom.