At WFH Adviser we tested over 15 ladder desks for structural integrity, weight capacity, design, price, and aesthetics. We did various setups across offices, bedroom, and home libraries and tested the desks to see how well they functioned for high quality home office work. This included using zero, one, and two monitors on each ladder desk and installing desk add-ons such as printers and storage.
What else did we do to solidify our perspectives?
- 1 month of testing in total across all ladder desks
- We tried 15 products and tested each from out of the box to full installation
- We tested each product for 3 days in 3 different environments each
- We had different members of our staff evaluate the products based on durability, quality, value, price, fit/finish, feel, size, weight of the desk, weight capacity that the desk can hold, and material durability.
We tested for the following metrics to ensure you can best understand the trade-offs of each product and match that with your home office needs.
Structural Integrity and Weight Capacity
Each desk manufacturer will tell you how much weight their desk can withstand. We actually put it to the test. Our thinking: a common work from home setup is a computer, extra monitor, accessories such as keyboards and a mouse. Add in a few extra nic nacs, office supplies, and a desk light, and you’re looking at a minimum need for 30 pounds of weight capacity.
We also added some breathing room and decided on a minimum of 40 pounds. How did we test? We put our computers and monitors on each desk. Then we added weights to it, and used each desk for three days. All of the desks below, passed our weight test.
Desktop Size and Surface Area
We reviewed each desk with its desktop size in mind as a key component. After all, you need a flat surface to conduct your work. The more space you have, the more comfortable the setup it will allow for. Not every desk can fit two monitors and a laptop.
However, if we wanted to optimize for purely desktop space, we’d simply recommend an executive style desk that takes up the whole office space. Instead, we analyzed desktop space, knowing that we had a limited size to begin with. We arrived on this heuristic: If it can fit a laptop, it made it on our list, and if it can fit an additional monitor, then that’s additional bonus points.
Value
Value means different things to different people. To us, it means quality times price times durability times aesthetic. Value doesn’t mean the cheapest possible product. We would rather pay more for a desk that looks great and will last longer – after all, we are only going to have one or two ladder desks in our home at a time.
Value also doesn’t mean buying the most expensive product at the highest price point because it’s a brand named manufacturer. So we strike a balance between quality and price to extract a definition of how much value we will get from the desk in the years to come.
Takeaways
After conducting these tests we leveraged insights, interviews, and our own personal experience to recommend these desks that brought value to our home office but that didn’t break the bank.
A ladder desk is great for saving space and they look very elegant: they provide ample storage (like a normal desk) but also use space more effectively. Ladder desks can also double as a nice bookshelf, making it the perfect piece of furniture for all types of rooms like the bedroom, office, or living room. These are our favorites and represent the best ladder desks on the market today.
Our key takeaway is this: ladder desks are great if you want to bridge the gap between interior design and a home office. For those looking to work with multiple monitors, it may not be for them. We found them to be most useful when we only needed our laptop, and we loved the aesthetics they brought to each room.
Here are our picks for the top 15 Wall Ladder Desks.
