That's workable. It takes a bit more thought than furnishing a dedicated room, mostly because the same few square metres have to do two jobs, and the office part has to stay out of the way of the living part in the evening.

For more on making small flats work harder, a Polish how-to portal with a whole section on home and garden is worth browsing, with or without a translate button. Below is what holds up in practice.

Pick the spot by light, not by where the table already is

The best place for a desk is next to a window, with the window to your side. Light from the side is even and doesn't cause glare. A window directly behind your monitor makes you squint all day, because your eyes keep adjusting between the bright window and the darker screen. A window behind you reflects in the screen and lights the back of your head on video calls while your face stays in shadow.

If the only free corner has no window, you'll need good artificial light. One ceiling lamp isn't enough. Add a desk lamp that lights the work surface without shining into your eyes. For working hours, a neutral white bulb, somewhere around 4000 K on the packaging, keeps you more alert than the warm 2700 K bulbs most people have at home. Switch to the warmer light in the evening, when the corner goes back to being part of the living room.

The desk: shallower than you'd think, but not too shallow

In a small flat, a narrow desk is tempting. Wall-mounted fold-down desks and slim console tables look great in photos. The problem is depth. If you work on an external monitor, you need it roughly an arm's length away, which means a desk at least 60 cm deep and ideally 70 or 80. On a 40 cm console table, the monitor ends up too close, and you end up leaning back on your chair or pushing the screen off the edge.

If you work only on a laptop, a shallower desk is fine, but add a laptop stand plus a separate keyboard and mouse. The stand raises the screen to eye level, and the separate keyboard keeps your arms in a comfortable position. That combination does more for your neck than any chair upgrade.

A chair you'll actually sit on for eight hours

A dining chair works for an afternoon. For a full working week it doesn't. You don't need an expensive ergonomic chair, but you do need one with height adjustment and some support for your lower back. Your feet should rest flat on the floor with your thighs roughly level, and the backrest should touch the small of your back.

If space is tight, look for an office chair without armrests. It slides fully under the desk once you finish work, which matters more in a small room than you'd expect.

Deal with sound before it deals with you

Small flats are loud. Hard floors, bare walls and a kitchen three metres away all bounce noise around, and you hear it most on calls. Soft surfaces help more than anything else: a rug under the desk, heavy curtains, a bookshelf full of books against a shared wall. They absorb sound and cost less than acoustic panels, and your living room doesn't end up looking like a recording studio.

For calls, a headset with a decent microphone makes a bigger difference than any room treatment. Your laptop's built-in microphone picks up every echo in the room. A headset mic sits a few centimetres from your mouth and mostly ignores it.

Cables and the everyday mess

A home office corner gets untidy in a specific way. Chargers, a monitor cable, a lamp cable and a power strip on the floor. Mount the power strip under the desk with a couple of screws or strong adhesive strips, and run cables along the back edge in a cable tray or even a few reusable ties. It takes half an hour and keeps the floor clear for cleaning.

Keep one drawer or box for everything work-related: notebooks, headset, the work laptop itself. The point is that it all has somewhere to go when the working day is over.

Draw a line between work and home

This is the part that matters most when the office is in the living room. Without a door to close, work leaks into the evening. You walk past the laptop at nine, see a notification, and suddenly you're answering an email.

Some people use a physical divider: a bookcase standing sideways, a folding screen, or a curtain on a ceiling track. Others rely on a routine. When you finish, close the laptop, put it in the drawer and switch off the desk lamp. It sounds too simple to work, and it works better than it sounds, because the corner stops looking like an office once the equipment is out of sight.

Internet that survives a video call

A corner office is often the corner furthest from the router, because the router lives wherever the installer found a socket. If calls freeze or your voice drops out, the problem is usually the Wi-Fi signal passing through two walls, not your internet plan.

The cheapest fix is a network cable. A ten-metre flat Ethernet cable runs along a skirting board almost invisibly and gives you a connection no wireless setup will match. If a cable really isn't an option, a mesh Wi-Fi kit with one unit near your desk solves most dead zones in a flat. Powerline adapters, which send the network through your electrical wiring, are worth a try too, though results depend heavily on the wiring in older buildings.

Video calls from a small corner

Last detail. Check what's behind you before your first call. A bed, a drying rack or a kitchen counter full of dishes is what everyone else will be looking at for an hour. Turn the desk so there's a wall or a bookshelf behind you, or use your call software's background blur. And raise the laptop so the camera is at eye level, not looking up your nose. A stack of two books does the job.