A World Of His Own

Dilbert's creator designs his dream office.

Tweet

SOHO Design

Scott Adams's dream office does more than just give him a place to create his Dilbert universe. It affords him the life he wants to live

Dilbert would simply drool.

Cartoonist Scott Adams's home office is light-years away from the soulless universe of cubicles inhabited by his comic-strip alter ego.

There's a pool table. A 35-inch TV/DVD player. A tiny home gym. A leather couch. A bathroom. Tartan wall coverings in red and hunter green. And the latest addition: a screened-in porch, decorated with wicker furniture, overlooking the wooded neighborhood surrounding Adams's northern California home. "On these warm California days, I can open the double glass doors and the office seems twice as big," says Adams, a 44-year-old transplant from Windham, N.Y. "It's a whole lot like sitting on the porch, even if you're inside."

Adams can be forgiven for swooning over his second-floor studio, created from space formerly occupied by two bedrooms. After all, he spent a long time -- 16 years, to be precise -- crammed into the same kind of numbingly uniform beige boxes that provide the backdrop for Dilbert, the comic strip whose eponymous nerdy engineer and his travails both mirror and lambaste American corporate culture.

At his most recent day job, Adams spent his working hours hunched over a computer in one of thousands of identical cubes at Pacific Bell's offices in San Ramon, Calif. He still remembers the number of his last little box: 4S750R ("fourth floor, south wing, zone 750, cubicle R"). Before that, his work habitat was a virtually identical cube at Crocker National Bank, in San Francisco. It was his experiences in the bowels of the bank's headquarters that inspired Dilbert's office adventures. His job wasn't all that bad, Adams says now, except that "every day I went to that cubicle, a little bit of my life force was sucked out of my body."

Obviously, Adams's current setup offers a diverting alternative to the cell-like cube world. But his office isn't just for play. It's clearly a work space, dominated by what Adams calls "the world's coolest desk," which was built to his specifications. The large, bat-wing-shaped table -- 3.5 feet wide and 16 feet long, from wing tip to wing tip -- features a panel in the middle that Adams can pull up and lock into place, creating a slanted drawing table. When he's not sketching Dilbert cartoons, he drops the panel back into the desk to create a huge, flat working surface. There's plenty of room for two computers -- a PC and a Macintosh -- as well as a printer, a fax machine, a scanner, a paper cutter, a phone, and a lamp. And if Adams needs still more space, he can transfer some of the clutter to custom-made bookshelves and file cabinets to his heart's content.

It wasn't always that way. Initially, Adams doodled at work, drawing pictures that lampooned his colleagues and managers. In the late 1980s, after reading a book about how to get syndicated, he persuaded United Media to distribute his cartoon strip, which initially ran in 50 newspapers. While still working full-time, he began drawing Dilbert in the living room of his apartment in Alameda, Calif., using a kitchen table left behind by a previous tenant.

Later, as the strip's popularity grew, Adams graduated to a bedroom office outfitted with an odd assortment of tables. In his current office he created a jury-rigged desk, which worked just fine but was rather less impressive than the bat-wing model he uses now. "It was a cobbled-together series of things that included an old dining-room table from another house, an old breakfast-nook table, and a dresser that I wasn't using anymore and that was about the same height as the tables," he says. "There was one more piece I can't even remember right now -- except that it didn't belong there."

That was before Dilbert's success changed Scott Adams's life. Now, besides drawing the cartoon strip, which runs in 2,000 newspapers in more than 50 countries, he has helped design licensed Dilbert products ranging from coffee mugs to computer games. He's also compiled more than a dozen Dilbert comic-strip collections and written several business books. The best-known of his books, The Dilbert Principle, topped the New York Times best-seller list in 1996. A Dilbert prime-time animated series on the UPN network fared less well: despite boasting an all-star voice cast that included Daniel Stern and Chris Elliott, the show was canceled last year.

 1 | 2 | 3  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: