Whether you work out of a home office because your company encourages telecommuting or because you’re newly self-employed, you need to think about form and function when it comes to an at-home workspace. Oregon Home asked a sound engineer, two interior designers and a home designer for advice on what works once you leave working in a cube.

Issuing an artistic challenge to his industrial design students at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., metal artist and industrial design professor Arunas Oslapas took it up himself.  “I asked them to intercept garbage and make something from it—and I’d do the same,” he says.

From a very early age, fiber artist Leena Riker has been working with yarn. “I grew up in Finland in an environment where a lot of things were made by hand,” she says. “I was born before World War II, and during the war, we had to be creative about making the things we needed. My mother taught me to sew, knit and crochet when I was 4, and I kept that up.”

As a child, furniture designer and artist Rachel Sanders knew her future lay in creating pieces for interiors. “I was always reassembling my room,” she says. “It was an ongoing project throughout my childhood. Then I’d go around the rest of the house and make sure everything was just so, sometimes to the annoyance of other members of my family.”

If you’d asked Rachael L K Kurynny just a few years ago whether she’d ever spend her spare time designing jewelry, her answer would’ve been no. “I was always a math and science girl,” says Kurynny. “I wasn’t thinking about doing art.”

Oh, the joy! You’re finally going to demo your dated kitchen cabinets and invest in a roomful of custom wenge—or cherry or lyptus—doors and drawers. Oregon Home asked kitchen remodelers, custom cabinetmakers, a cabinet installer and a cabinet hardware maven to open up about how to ensure that your kitchen cabinets cook up the look—and function—you want.

When furnituremaker Bill More left Brooklyn, N.Y. and headed west on a train, the trip had an unexpected result. “I met my wife on that train,” he says. “She got on in Wisconsin, and neither of us got off until the train arrived in Portland.”

More grew up in New Jersey, where school sparked an interest in building things. “I liked classes like shop where they’d give you tools and just let you work with them,” he says.   

Washram, Wash.-based mosaic artist Toms Royal became interested in tile when he owned a pottery-painting studio in Portland. “We began to offer classes in mosaics, so I had to learn how to do it,” he says. “I discovered that I enjoyed the medium and that it was a way to use my theories about design.”