Review: Stykka StayTheF***Home Desk

Hunching over a laptop and working on a kitchen table gets old fast. At least it did for me last spring, when the pandemic took hold of the US. It’s even worse if you live with someone and are both trying to work off the same couch. If your living room hasn't devolved into a Planet of the Apes–style death match, then congratulations. You and yours have vast reserves of patience.

The rest of us just want a workspace, even if it’s temporary, without the crouching and scowling. That’s what the Danish brand Stykka aims to provide with its StayTheF***Home Desk. It’s not meant to be a permanent fixture. It’s made to tide you over until you’re back at the old office or get a more permanent home office. All you get are some sheets of corrugated cardboard with a few prepunched holes and a pack of zip ties.

The $85 model I tested is around 30 inches tall, which is a typical desk height. You can also order taller versions if you prefer to stand, and you get your choice of white or regular tan cardboard. Sadly, after a couple of weeks, its structural flaws made me miss sitting at the kitchen table.

The problems start with the instructions, which are some of the worst I've ever seen. The illustrations don't exactly match the desk in front of you, and the pictures are so tiny they’re almost illegible. Just follow the more accurate assembly video on Stykka's website (although it's sped up for some inexplicable reason and also hard to follow). 

Assembly mostly involves folding up the various pieces of cardboard and putting zip ties into pre-made holes to hold pieces together. Some of the holes the zip ties go through don't line up, so you'll have to muscle them into alignment. Many holes are more slot-like than circular, forcing the zip ties into angles that don't work. You'll want to ream them out with a screwdriver before. I used a pair of pliers to cinch down the zip ties as tight as I could.

I ended up running out of zip ties due to the poor instructions, so I had to stop halfway through and get more at a hardware store. If Stykka was just a bit more clear, I wouldn't have spent ages wondering how to get the contours built into the desktop’s edges (they naturally happen when you tighten the zip ties enough to create it into shape). 

A cardboard desk is a fun idea! Building it should've felt playful, like a kid constructing a fort out of discarded boxes. It's a shame I mostly felt frustrated.  

Photograph: Stykka

Cardboard desks are always going to be temporary, but that shouldn't be an excuse to have structural design flaws. There are a few on the Stykka. First, the lateral support under the desktop is made up of two layers of corrugated cardboard folded over itself running lengthwise. It keeps the tops of the legs joined together by zip ties, but there's no such support between the bottoms of the legs, so they hinge at the top and wiggle around. 

Zip ties alone aren’t strong enough to fasten the legs together and keep them from bending where they meet the desktop, so it’s easy and common for both legs to splay outward—away from each other—like the hind legs of a dog walking over ice. There are also no zip ties to join together the bottom of each leg as there are on top. That becomes a problem. The two separate cardboard pieces that comprise each leg slip out and move around independently of each other near the floor. I think this is the desk's fatal weakness.

Eating lunch on it or putting down a cup of coffee was just asking for a big spill. I couldn’t trust it with my laptop or monitor. I ended up using it as a surface for organizing other WIRED gear I was testing—lightweight stuff that couldn't break, like outdoor clothes—but they still ended up flying onto the floor whenever I disturbed the desk's delicate balance.

On a Zoom call with the other WIRED reviewers, I put a few guitar accessories on the Stykka and demonstrated jostling it. Even though the legs remained in contact with the ground the whole time, it bucked like a mechanical bull and dumped everything off. 

It doesn't help that the edges of the desk are sharp. I eventually developed a Pavlovian flinch anytime I tried to slip past the desk, fearing another cut to my forearms or hands.

My time with the StayTheF***Home desk came to a premature end. It had just had one of its object-tossing spasms after I bumped into it, and as I was lifting it to straighten the legs yet again, the center support snapped. Fatal wound, probably? I stood the desk up on its end for a look and I heard another snap. This time it was one of the legs. OK, definitely fatal. 

The top of the desk, which is made of two layers of corrugated cardboard folded over like a trifold (six layers, total), was bowed upward in the center and created a mound that made the surface uneven. 

Stykka had a neat idea, but this cardboard desk is too expensive and unsteady to recommend. I do like that the company has made the desk's production files available for anyone to download, so you can try building it yourself. Maybe you'll have better luck. Everyone that's lucky enough to work from home should sit at a desk if possible; it's just more ergonomic than the couch. 

If you need a temporary desk and don’t want to spend a ton, my colleague Julian Chokkattu recommends this desk ($135), which is also in our Work From Home Gear guide. It has foldable legs, takes minutes to set up, and has been sturdy for the year he’s been using it.

I wasn't expecting anything particularly stable or durable when I called in the StayTheF***Home desk, and I was willing to accept a certain level of flimsiness, but my experience surprised me. I thought it would at least be usable. But hey, at least I can recycle it. Right after I cut it up into some templates for mounting shelves in my WFH castle.