There is nothing fundamentally good about an office phone booth. A sealed-off stall for making private calls is a clunky solution to compensate for the architectural pitfalls of ill-conceived open-plan offices. With not enough attention to built-in acoustical solutions, these offices can be roaringly loud—about 10 decibels higher than what’s ideal for knowledge work, according to a report from Steelcase, the office architecture and furniture giant.

Quartz recently installed two phone booths in our New York office, and I’m sorry to say that the experience of using them is like being trapped in an upright coffin.

The morbid suggestion of expiring inside a padded box in the office is underscored by recent news about WeWork’s toxic phone booths. Last month, the beleaguered co-working company reportedly recalled 2,300 units due to elevated levels of formaldehyde, a substance linked to respiratory issues and, at high levels of exposure, to cancers.

But like it or not, in-office phone booths are here to stay. Rapt Studiofounder David Galullo, who has designed offices for companies including PayPal, Vans, GE, and LinkedIn, observes that off-the-shelf options have become imperative. “[It’s] the cost of acknowledging that millions of square feet of open office space was an experiment gone not-exactly-right,” he says.

Clive Wilkinson, the designer of Google’s sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters and author of the new book The Theater of Work, says office phone booths fulfill the need for quiet work of video conferencing, without great expense. “Their small footprint makes them easy to accommodate and also to provide in numbers that make them genuinely useful,” he tells Quartz.

There’s a variety of models, ranging from no-frills cubicles to larger units with motion-activated lights and fans. Beyond considering cost and colors, here are a few pointers for choosing the least oppressive phone booth for your office.

The smell test

WeWork’s faulty booths were discovered when UBS employees complained of a strange odor wafting into their office in Weehawken, New Jersey. The financial services company’s 100,000-sq-ft facilitywas designed by “Powered By We,” WeWork’s office-property management arm. Fragrance expert Olivia Jezler says that weird smells often tip us to unhealthy materials. “Most felt-type materials chosen for their soundproofing abilities are made with glues that exude toxic fumes,” she explains. Similar adhesives are used in engineered wood products such as the medium-density fiberboard used to build the frames of the booths.

Known widely as an embalming agent, formaldehyde is actually among the most common industrial materials in furniture-making. The US National Institutes of Health say that trace amounts in the air—0.75 parts of formaldehyde per 1 million parts of air—is likely not harmful. The problem, Jezler points out, is that you reach these occupational limits pretty quickly in a sealed-off phone booth because it’s so compact. Whatever the configuration might be, look for models with an air vent, she says.

Wilkinson, too, says airflow is the primary criteria for evaluating phone booths. “If they’re intended to be moveable and indeed considered furniture, they must have either a compact air condition unit or fan that can ensure the internal space is comfortable,” he argues.