The New Home Office: How Optima Designs for the Way We Work Now

The way people work has changed more in the last five years than in the previous fifty. Remote work, hybrid schedules, and the collapse of the hard boundary between office and home have fundamentally altered what people need from the places they live. At Optima Lakeview, the answer begins in the atrium, and extends through every floor of a building designed, from its architectural core outward, for the fullness of the life lived inside it.

Designed for Work, From the Inside Out

The foundation of Optima’s work-from-home offer begins in the residence itself. Every Optima floor plan is designed to accommodate a dedicated workspace, a desk, a corner, a room configured for separation between professional and personal life. That separation matters. The research is consistent: a defined work zone improves focus, reduces distraction, and makes it easier to close the day and return to the rest of life.

The architecture helps. Floor-to-ceiling glass fills every Optima residence with natural light throughout the working day, the kind of light that regulates sleep, sustains energy, and makes a desk in the corner of a living room feel less like a compromise and more like a considered choice.

At Optima Lakeview, that desk faces the Lakeview neighborhood through floor-to-ceiling glass, the tree canopy on North Broadway, the city stretching south, the quality of Chicago light that changes dramatically with the season and the hour. The building’s exceptional natural light, drawn deep into the interior by the seven-story skylit atrium, means that every residence benefits from a quality of daylight that most Chicago apartments, with their narrower footprints and smaller windows, cannot offer.

When You Need to Step Outside the Apartment

The most important thing Optima Lakeview offers the remote worker is what it offers everyone: the ability to leave the apartment without going anywhere. The seven-story skylit atrium, filled with natural light and a hanging garden that matures with each passing season, is the building’s communal heart, and it functions, for the resident who has been staring at a screen since 8am, as the most restorative change of scene a building can provide. No commute. No weather. Just light, greenery, and the ambient life of a community that is always going on around you.

The business center at Optima Lakeview, furnished with the Opera Chair by Busk+Herzog and designed for quiet concentration within an open environment, provides professional-grade work space for the calls and meetings that the apartment is not configured for. Conference rooms provide the proper setting for the client presentation or the team video call that needs a backdrop worth showing. For the informal meeting or the mid-morning break, the Lakeview neighborhood beyond the front door offers the density of cafes, restaurants, and co-working options that makes this one of Chicago’s most productive neighborhoods for remote workers.

The Home You Work In

The best residential communities anticipate how life actually unfolds, not just how it was imagined at the point of design. The shift toward remote and hybrid work has tested that anticipation hard. Optima communities have met it, not because work-from-home amenities were added in response to demand, but because the design philosophy, that a home should support the full complexity of the life lived inside it, was already pointing in the right direction.

From a floor plan designed for a dedicated desk to a business center that handles the professional meeting; from a skylit atrium that resets the afternoon to a rooftop sky deck that closes the day above the Chicago skyline, Optima Lakeview is designed for the way people actually work now.

Come see the spaces that make working from home genuinely work. Schedule a tour at Optima Lakeview today.