Standing Desks

Almost every desk in this section rides the same electric column, and that column is the reason the range hangs together: 28.35 inches at the bottom, 46.46 at the top, four saved heights, one motor. Two figures matter more than the marketing around them. The bottom of the range decides whether a shorter person can sit at the desk without a footrest, and the top decides whether a taller person can stand at it without stooping. Everything between those numbers is the same desk.

So the choice is a floor-plan question rather than a mechanism question. The 48 by 24 inch tops are the standard answer for a spare room or a corner of a bedroom: one screen, a laptop beside it, and enough left over to write on. The 55 by 28 inch tops are what a second screen needs, because 24 inches of depth puts a pair of monitors too close to the face once they are on a mount. At the bottom of the range a 31 by 19 inch top exists for an alcove or a dorm room, and at the other end the 71 by 30 is for a room that is an office rather than a room with a desk in it.

A few models sit outside that logic on purpose. The children's desk runs 18.9 to 28.3 inches, which is the range below every other desk here, and it is the only model in the catalogue a full-grown adult cannot stand at. The largest top, the 71 by 30, carries 220 pounds rather than 176, which is the difference between a desk that holds a monitor arm and a desk that holds a monitor arm plus everything that ends up hanging off it. Two of the newer models reach slightly further, 27.9 to 46.8 inches, and three of them publish no load figure at all, which is noted on each of their pages.