How do I Choose the Best Glass Office Furniture?

Attractive glass office furniture can make the smallest, oldest workspace look larger and more modern. In general, the size of the commercial space should help determine the scale of furniture you should buy. The bigger the office, the larger the glass office furniture pieces you can use. Other considerations to make when choosing glass pieces for your particular workspace are maintenance and safety.

Tempered glass is the safest choice for furniture because of its safety. When broken, regular glass tabletops or shelves tend to be in sharp shards that may cause serious cuts. Safety, or tempered, glass is designed to break into small pieces that aren't likely to be too damaging. Some parts of the world, such as those under European Union laws, have strict stipulations that glass used in furniture must be the safe, tempered type. In the United States as well as some other countries, there are typically no such laws; read the labels of the glass office furniture you're considering purchasing for words such as “safety” or “tempered.”

While glass shelving, desktops and waiting room coffee tables may make a workspace seem visually bigger, they can also detract from the overall look if the furniture isn't well maintained. Glass office furniture may not be right for your workplace if it's not going to be wiped regularly to keep it looking attractive. Coffee stains and dust tend to show a lot more on glass tabletops than they do on wood surfaces. Yet, glass tops can be custom made to protect good quality wood desktops from scratches and blobs of ink.

If protecting wood isn't a concern, but storage or organizational space is, the type of modern office desk or coffee table with a raised glass top may be a good idea. These pieces of glass office furniture have a lower surface that allow some storage on it such as paperwork or magazines, plus an extra transparent top raised above this to use as the main working surface. These pieces can be very stylish for a commercial space, as they're available in unique shapes such as kidney or oblong.

An interesting storage idea that can work well with other glass office furniture is a curio cabinet used to hold neat stacks of paper or rows of binders or books. Glass curio cabinets are usually good space savers, as they're often modular, or in units, that can be used separately or in groups as needed for storage. Since these glass shelving units are typically compact, they may even fit into the smallest office area to provide extra storage space.