[Photo: Peter Guenzel/courtesy Established & Sons]

At least 5% of Americans work from home now, and 70% of people globally work from home at least once a week. Telecommuting certainly has its benefits, but work-life balance can be tough, especially for those of us who live in ever-shrinking apartments without dedicated office space.

It’s just this convergence of trends that inspired British furniture brand Established & Sons to hire designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec to create Grid. Grid is a flexible, modular piece of furniture meant to adapt to life inside a converged home-office.

Grid’s base is a powder-coated steel frame that’s either L- or U-shaped, much like a couch sectional would be. Atop the industrial base sits a wood board that allows it to serve as a table. And on top of the wood, you can also place upholstery, so it can be a comfortable seat or couch.

On the flip side of the design, Grid features a small shelf that can serve as a desk. And in between these two worlds lives a partition that’s either wood veneer, upholstered to stop sound, or, as seen here, a metal grid that looks something like a bird cage for humans.

The idea of the grid is that you can talk through it to someone else in your apartment, so it’s less confining than a traditional wall. It’s a half-step better than working in a cubicle. Perhaps. But perhaps it just feels like you’re always, sort of, in prison.

In any case, we’ve seen privacy pods like Grid in office spaces for the better part of a decade now, as they’ve become increasingly popular as a way to mitigate the distracting effects of an open floor plan. Having worked in tiny, domestic spaces for most of my career, I appreciate the possibility for furniture that can tune others out without totally closing you off. Then again, whatever Grid costs would likely cover a whole lot of trips to Starbucks to just get you out of the house instead.