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About this tool
Size the desk, chair clearance, shelving and lighting for a study room from its floor dimensions.
This planner turns a room's length and width into the working numbers for a study: how wide the desk run must be, how much depth the desk plus a pushed-back chair takes off the wall, how many shelves the books need and how many lumens the room and the desk should get. Lighting uses the lumen method — target lux × floor area ÷ (utilisation factor × maintenance factor) — with the 300 lux general and 500 lux task levels that interior lighting standards set for reading and writing. Clearances follow the usual ergonomic minimums: 600 mm of desk depth, 900 mm behind the desk for the chair and 750 mm for a walkway.
Open Study Room Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Tells you plainly whether the desk run and chair clearance actually fit the room you have.
Sizes lighting by the lumen method against published lux targets, so LED wattage never enters the maths.
Converts a book count into metres of shelf, shelf boards and bookcase bays.
Allow 1200 mm of width per person for comfort (750 mm is the tight minimum) and 600-750 mm of depth. Add 900 mm behind the desk edge so the chair can be pushed back and sat in, which makes a total zone of about 1650 mm measured off the wall.
Aim for 300 lux of general light and 500 lux on the desk itself. Using the lumen method with a 0.5 utilisation factor and 0.8 maintenance factor, a 10.8 m² study needs roughly 8,100 lumens of ceiling light, plus about 600 lumens from a desk lamp on the task area.
A common anthropometric rule of thumb puts desk height at about 0.42 of standing height and seat height at about 0.25, so a 170 cm person suits a desk near 715 mm and a seat near 425 mm. Adjust from there: elbows should rest at roughly desk height with the forearms level and feet flat on the floor or a footrest.
About 33, taking an average spine of 30 mm — so 200 books need roughly 6 m of shelf, which is seven 900 mm shelf boards, or two standard five-shelf bookcase bays. Reference volumes and textbooks have thicker spines, so leave a margin if the collection is mostly hardbacks.