Despite the glorious life of a jet-setting photographer *cough*, it’s easy to get bogged down at the desk to do the thousand other tasks waiting for you. To have a great desk is paramount. I’ve had my fair share of desks. My biggest one was an L-shaped desk that was over 6 square meters. My smallest one was this tiny aluminium piece of junk, just enough to have a keyboard and mouse. My last desk was pretty, just big enough, but nowhere ergonomic.
Enter the new IKEA BEKANT sit/stand desk. As the name suggest it’s a regular desk that can be transformed to a standing desk with the touch of a button. The 489 USD/ 569 EUR marvel offers heights between 65 en 125 cm. That’s 22″ and 48” for our American friends, which makes it easy to work almost sitting on the ground, or standing quite tall.
The heavy duty metal legs are up for the challenge of lifting the entire desk without any issues, but I wouldn’t take the chance to sit on the desk itself.
My comfortable standing height isn’t anywhere near its highest point.
On a more low level, it looks great paired with a bright yellow Eames.
While some people absolutely hate putting together IKEA, I just love it. It’s part of the process, like a LEGO set. You do want a buddy to come over to build this one though, this is quite a heavy desk. It’s also quite a bit larger than my previous desk, giving me a lot more of work estate (and of course eating away my precious living room space.
With the extra desk real-estate and the clean design, I’ve weirdly enough to manage a clean desk policy, something that I never managed to keep up.
As soon as everything is plugged in, it just works. Going up and down on a steady pace that doesn’t feel too slow, and isn’t too fast so you can’t fine tune the controls.
The controls themselves however feel like those cheap bubble buttons, making it happen more than once that you lose grip and make the desk stop mid-change.
In the two weeks that I’ve been using my desk my shoulder ache has already lessened. It’s as far as I am concerned, the best desk I’ve ever used.
