At my first real job just out of college, I’d pass the time between meetings looking at lifestyle and design blogs, which I’d never encountered until then. My desk was a nondescript study in beige with a utilitarian wheeled chair, a double-screen PC, and a putty-colored faux wall divider—there I’d sit, scrolling through the pages.

The office was in a 40-story high-rise right in the middle of Times Square. The closest you could get to nature was snagging a metal bistro chair on the rectangular lawn of Bryant Park, which on a nice day would be mobbed with New Yorkers. Walking outside on a coffee break meant encountering a sea of concrete and pigeons and so many tourists lining up in front of the M&M store that you’d have to step off the sidewalks and navigate the steam grates in heels. Lunch was usually leftovers from last night’s dinner, stashed in a Tupperware in the office mini fridge. The coffee was lukewarm and the entire building felt like one long trip to Office Depot: fluorescent lighting and piles of ballpoint pens that never wrote smoothly and stacks of thin computer paper and clunky phones with tightly coiled plastic cords.