Tag Archives: laptop desk

Stowaway Lap Desk Hides Your Laptop Inside When You’re Done Working

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A lot of work now happens on beds, sofas, and in hotel rooms, with laptops balanced on knees and chargers snaking across blankets. Most lap desks are flimsy plastic trays that solve heat and stability but do nothing for clutter, leaving pens, earbuds, and phones scattered around you. The Arlo Skye Stowaway Lap Desk is a piece of travel-inspired furniture that tries to make mobile work feel less improvised and more intentional.

The Stowaway Lap Desk 19 is a compact mobile workstation built around a white-oak work surface and a cushioned base. It is sized for a 16-inch laptop, with room for a mouse or notebook, and designed to move between bed, sofa, and carry-on without looking like office gear. The defining move is the hidden storage built into the desk itself, turning it into a portable drawer for your laptop and everyday tools.

Designer: Arlo Skye

A slot along the back edge holds a tablet or phone upright, turning the lap desk into a small command center with multiple screens. The oak surface is framed by a low lip on three sides, which keeps devices and pens from sliding off when you shift position. The result is a stable, furniture-like platform that feels more like a small table than a tray, with enough space to spread out without everything falling into the blankets.

The top opens to reveal a compartment large enough for a laptop, tablet, and flat accessories. That means when you are done working, everything can live inside the desk instead of being scattered across the bed or sofa. A cut-out doubles as a cable pass-through, so you can charge devices while they are tucked away, keeping cords from tangling around your legs or snagging on bedding when you move.

The microbead cushion attached to the underside conforms to your lap and lifts the wooden surface off your legs. It helps with ventilation and spreads weight more evenly than a hard board. Some reviewers find microbeads firmer than expected, but the combination of cushion and wood still feels more considered than a bare tray or a laptop directly on your knees, especially during longer work sessions that stretch past an hour.

The lap desk doubles as a side table or serving tray when you are not working, holding breakfast, snacks, or a book without needing a separate piece of furniture. The oak top and dark cushion let it blend into a bedroom or living room without screaming office, so it can live out in the open instead of being hidden in a closet between uses, ready to grab whenever you need it.

The Stowaway Lap Desk changes the experience of working away from a desk. It corrals your tools, gives them a defined home, and makes it easier to pack up in one motion when you are done. The idea of a lap desk that behaves like a small, self-contained workstation feels like a welcome upgrade over the usual plastic slab, especially when your office is often a bed, sofa, or hotel room and you need every piece of gear to earn its footprint.

The post Stowaway Lap Desk Hides Your Laptop Inside When You’re Done Working first appeared on Yanko Design.

Cosi Laptop Table Brings a Fully Adjustable Work Surface to Any Chair

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Laptops have escaped the desk and now show up on sofas, lounge chairs, and every in-between space, often with terrible posture as a side effect. Balancing a laptop on your knees or hunching over a coffee table is fine for checking email but not for real work. The Cosi laptop table is a small, adjustable surface designed to follow those habits and make them more ergonomic.

Cosi is a fully adjustable laptop table developed by Pearson Lloyd for Teknion’s portfolio. It’s a compact side table with a height-adjustable column and a slim top, meant to support typing, writing, or video calls whether you’re in a task chair or a deep lounge. Despite its simple silhouette, it’s the result of a careful review of how people actually work across different seating types and informal spaces.

Designer: Pearson Lloyd for Teknion

The basic form is a thin rectangular top with softly rounded corners sitting on a single round column, which rises from a flat, low-profile base. The base is slim enough to slide under chair legs or lounge frames, while the offset column lets the top cantilever over your lap. The proportions keep it visually light, so it reads as a quiet companion rather than a shrunken desk taking up floor space.

The column allows the top to move from standard typing height when you’re upright in a task chair to a higher position when you’re reclined in a lounge. That means your wrists and shoulders can stay in a more neutral position instead of hunching over a laptop balanced on your knees. Cosi turns casual seating into a place where you can actually work comfortably for more than ten minutes.

Paired with Teknion’s Aarea lounge chairs, the base tucks under the sled frame while the top hovers over the seat. In more traditional offices, it can park next to task chairs as a personal work island. Because it’s small and visually quiet, multiple tables can live in a lounge or focus area without making the space feel cluttered or over-furnished like a forest of full-size desks.

The detailing makes it feel more like furniture than equipment. The tabletop edge is thin and refined, the column-to-base junction is clean, and the finishes align with Teknion’s broader palette, from neutral paints to wood-look tops. There are no exposed mechanisms or clunky levers, just a smooth, minimal form that hides the engineering and lets you focus on the surface itself.

Cosi is one of those small tools that quietly make hybrid work more sustainable. It doesn’t try to replace a full desk, but it gives laptops a proper landing spot wherever you choose to sit. By combining adjustability, a slim footprint, and a restrained aesthetic, it turns the improvised habit of working from any chair into something your body and your workspace can live with a little better.

The post Cosi Laptop Table Brings a Fully Adjustable Work Surface to Any Chair first appeared on Yanko Design.

Origami-inspired foldable laptop desk also functions as a car table and food tray

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Laptops today are truly powerful computers worthy of the title of “desktop replacements,” but despite their name, they have never really been great to use on your lap. Yes, you can put them there, at least until they get too hot, but they’re not the most comfortable nor the most ergonomic positions. Some laptop desks or trays, particularly the ones with cushions, try to fix some of that by slightly raising the laptop while still pressing down on your lap and preventing proper blood circulation. The ones with legs, on the other, are best used in bed or sometimes on desks, undoing the benefit of portability. This rather curious design, however, promises to address all those and let you use your laptop in your seat or even have food or a drink on the side.

Designer: FansDreams

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Unlike a typical laptop desk with legs, the Fansdreams Pi takes a few pages from the Japanese art of paper folding to keep its form slim and light. In a nutshell, it uses downward force to lock the legs in place and uses flat planes to hold the desk up. Thanks to that, the Pi is only 0.5 inches (12.7mm) thin when folded, while the use of PU leather and high-strength fiberglass gives it its durability and light 2-lb weight.

Perhaps more interesting than its appearance is the different functions the foldable desk serves. Of course, it holds your laptop up at a higher level, but there’s also enough space to put other items at the side, like a game controller, a bowl of food, or even a drink. Ideally, you wouldn’t put liquid near a laptop, but it can happen at times. And when not in use as an actual laptop desk, the Fansdreams Pi can function as a car table for actual eating or maybe working white paper.

The Pi laptop desk has one rather curious form where you turn it upside down and use one of the legs to raise the laptop at an incline. This configuration is good for having the screen at a higher level, though you’ll probably have to use a separate keyboard to type more comfortably. Either way, it’s also a good demonstration of how sturdy and stable the legs can be if they can support the weight of the laptop directly.

The Fansdreams Pi’s thin and lightweight design makes it easy to bring anywhere, though its rather long surface might not fit some smaller bags. And while it does bring the convenience of being able to work even in a car, it does encourage a rather unusual and somewhat unhealthy lifestyle of simply working and eating anywhere.

The post Origami-inspired foldable laptop desk also functions as a car table and food tray first appeared on Yanko Design.