Nearly four out of ten Swedish workers now work from home to some extent, and in 2025 office workers spent an average of 1.77 days a week at the kitchen table or in a corner of the bedroom. Yet most of us treat the home office as an afterthought—a blank wall, a screen, and a chair. The question is whether that bare wall is costing us more than we think. One field of research that has grown rapidly over the past decade points in the same direction: what you hang in front of you affects both how long you can stay focused and how much you actually get done. A well-chosen poster isn’t decoration on the side—it’s part of the work environment.
This article brings together what the actual research says—controlled experiments, measurements of skin conductance and brain activity—and translates it into practical decisions for anyone who has set up a home office. No vague claims that art “brightens things up,” just figures, names, and dates.
Fast facts: In psychologists Craig Knight and Alex Haslam’s office experiment, published in 2010 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, participants in an enriched office with art and plants were 17 percent more productive than in a bare room—and 32 percent more productive when they got to decide on the decorations themselves, without any increase in the number of errors.
Knight and Haslam’s office experiment: 17 and 32 percent, respectively
The most frequently cited study in this area comes from Craig Knight and Alex Haslam. They asked participants to complete work tasks in four different versions of the same room. The bare room contained only the essentials. In the enriched room, the researchers had added art to the walls and green plants. In the third, participants were allowed to arrange the art and plants as they wished. In the fourth, participants were first allowed to decorate—and then everything was taken down again.
The results were clear. Simply adding art and greenery increased productivity by 17 percent compared with the bare room. But when participants got to decide for themselves what to hang on the walls, the figure rose to 32 percent—and they didn’t make any more mistakes. The fourth room, where people were first allowed to decorate and then had everything taken away, produced the lowest level of satisfaction of all. So the conclusion isn’t just that there’s art on the wall, but who chose it.
For a home office, that’s an almost liberating realization. You don’t need to hire an interior designer. You already have the decisive tool: the right to choose for yourself what hangs in front of you eight hours a day. That sense of ownership is part of the effect, not an added bonus.
"The blank wall is not neutral – it is an environment the brain has to compensate for."
The blank wall and the brain’s directed attention
Why would an image affect how much work we can handle at all? This is where psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s attention restoration theory comes in handy. Their basic idea is that our directed attention – the ability to focus on a task and block out everything else – is a limited resource. Every email, every notification, and every time we force ourselves back to the screen wears it down. When it is depleted, we make more careless mistakes and become more easily irritated.
Kaplans argue that certain environments allow fatigued attention to rest and recharge. They identify three qualities of such a restorative environment: a sense of being somewhere else, a gentle fascination that draws the eye without requiring effort, and a sense of spaciousness and coherence. Nature is the clearest example – but research shows that even an image of nature can trigger some of the same effect. It is precisely this gentle fascination that a well-chosen poster can provide: something for the eyes to rest on between two difficult sentences in a document.
The functions most affected by restoration are precisely the ones we rely on most during a workday: executive attention and working memory – the ability to handle conflicting information, block out distractions, and keep a goal in mind. These are the same abilities that wear down as the hours pass and the inbox fills up. An image that gives a tired brain a short break is therefore not a luxury, but a way of caring for exactly the resources work demands.
A study published in Frontiers in Psychology in September 2024 developed a scale for measuring how restorative different office environments feel, based directly on Kaplan’s three components. One of the more surprising findings was that the so-called color fractal dimension often predicted perceived restoration more strongly than the amount of greenery in the room itself. In other words, how a motif is visually structured can matter more than whether it happens to be a plant.
Fractals between 1.3 and 1.5 – nature’s dose for a tired brain
This is where it gets really concrete. Richard Taylor, a physicist and neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, has spent decades studying fractals – repeating patterns at different scales that we recognize in coastlines, tree canopies, clouds, and Jackson Pollock’s paintings. A fractal’s complexity is described by a number between 1 and 2, with a higher value meaning a more finely branched and dense pattern.
Taylor measured participants’ skin conductance, an established measure of physiological stress, and recorded their brain activity with EEG as they viewed different images. The result was striking: people recovered from stress up to 60 percent better when looking at patterns with a fractal dimension between 1.3 and 1.5 – exactly the range that dominates in nature. Taylor suggests the explanation is a kind of resonance: the visual system is itself built on fractal patterns and processes patterns in this range with minimal effort. That ease of processing feels pleasant – and is accompanied by lower stress levels.
Tip: You don’t need a formula to find the right fractal dimension. It’s already there in branches, ferns, mountain silhouettes, wave patterns, and softly abstract images. Choose a nature-inspired or organic image rather than a strictly geometric grid if the wall is directly in front of your desk, where your eyes rest most often.
This is also the key to why botanical and nature-inspired images recur in almost every study of art and well-being. They fall within the visual range the brain processes most easily. For a home office, that means a poster featuring a tree, a coastline, or a leafy branch isn’t a random decorative choice – it gives your eyes a micro-break of exactly the kind attention research recommends. And because the effect comes from brief glances rather than long breaks, it’s easy to fit into a workday: you don’t need to go out into the forest; simply look up for a few seconds between paragraphs.
From research to wall: how to choose art for your home office
So how do you put all this into practice? The first piece of advice follows directly from Knight and Haslam: choose for yourself. A poster you like and have actively chosen beats a “stylish but impersonal” image every time, because a sense of ownership is part of the effect. So don’t start with a template; start with an image that actually means something to you.
Place the most important image in a prominent spot behind or beside the screen, on the wall your eyes naturally turn to when you pause your thoughts. A calm, nature-inspired or softly abstract image works well there – something to rest your eyes on rather than analyze. Botanical prints, landscapes, and gently organic forms do the job. You can find this kind of image in our nature prints collection as well as among our botanical posters.
Save stimulating artwork for the side walls. A bold graphic or colorful image can be energizing, but you don't want it directly in your field of vision when you're deeply focused - it draws your attention where it shouldn't. Hung a little to the side, it becomes a positive break when you get up or switch tasks. For those who prefer a cleaner look, minimalist posters and subdued abstract posters work well in that role.
Think about scale. In a home office, you sit close to the wall, often just a meter or two away, which means even a medium-sized print like 30x40 cm makes a strong impression. If the artwork is meant to fill an entire wall behind your desk, 50x70 cm works better. And if you really want to recreate Knight and Haslam's enriched room, try combining one or two posters with a live plant. That's exactly the combination measured in the original study. If you'd like to explore the room as a whole, we have a separate guide to posters for the home office, and if you'd like to read more about nature's measurable effects, see our overview of research on nature imagery and stress, as well as a broader look at what research says about art and well-being.
Frequently asked questions about art for the home office
In other words, the blank wall in front of your desk is an underrated work tool. Research paints a remarkably consistent picture: we work better, make fewer mistakes, and feel better in a room we’ve had a hand in shaping, ideally with images that give the brain brief, nature-inspired breaks. Start with an image you like and let your eye decide where it should go. You can browse our full range of posters whenever you want to give your home office a wall worth looking at. Sources: Knight and Haslam’s office experiment, described by ScienceDaily; Kaplan’s attention restoration theory, summarized by PositivePsychology.com; and Richard Taylor’s research on fractals, described in Smithsonian Magazine.