Office of managing a budget

City Council president redesigns on the cheap

(photos by essdras m suarez/globe staff)

Most of us don't give a lot of thought to workspace decor. And why would we? A photo on the desk of last summer's camping trip in Maine, and that's about it for personality.

Michael Ross, named president of the Boston City Council in January, wanted to put a little more thought into his new City Hall office. After all, when he's not traipsing around his district talking to constituents, he's in his office . . . talking to constituents. So he wanted it to be welcoming, a place where his staffers could work comfortably and people could sit down and hash out the issues.

And he wanted to do it all very, very cheaply. As in, out of his own campaign funds - not on the public dime.

"I'm not looking to put this on the taxpayer," said Ross, 37. "I also don't have a lot of money."

Ross enlisted the help of an old friend, designer Karen Tager, to put together an office - OK, it's really three connected offices - that would work for everyone, with a price tag of less than $5,000. Just undoing what was already there took some time: They had to paint over the rose-colored walls and tear up yards of well-past-its-prime blue carpeting. Then, with a clean slate, they started over. Here's what they came up with.

Ross sits at his old desk in his new office. "Oh yeah, the desk's not new. It was dragged in from the old office."

Tager and Ross found the gray sofa at Jordan's, marked down to $699. "The color worked, the scale worked, and also the price worked," Tager said. She and her husband, Adam, donated the throw pillows, estimated value $45 each. "The sofa sits very deep. The pillows provide that little bit of back support for short people like me." The round side table, from Ikea, cost $119. Tager got the hammered-base lamp at West Elm for 60 percent off - a grand total of about $40. "In this economy, there's also opportunity," Tager said.

Two compact leather chairs ($499 each from Jordan's) give visitors more seating, while the Ikea bookshelf units (three for $89 each from Ikea) form a long credenza that unifies the long, narrow office space, Tager said. The designer went with carpet tiles from Flor to warm up the space. "They're great," she said. "If something spills on one piece, you can replace it and not have to replace the whole carpet. And they're eco-friendly, so they're a good company to support." The TV is a used one Ross got from a friend. "It's not HD," he said, smiling.

Transparent lucite chairs in the waiting area ($99 each, from Ikea) are comfortable, but don't make the space feel cluttered. "It's tight, and a lot of people walk through there," Tager said. "They're substantial but they don't take up any visual space." The Ikea occasional table costs a cool $12.99.

Ross hadn't hung most of his memorabilia when we visited, but the collection is very important to him. Among the framed pieces, he keeps a black and white picture of his father, Stephan Ross, working with youths in South Boston, and a poster of Barney Frank with the infamous motto: "Neatness isn't everything." In fairness, the day we visited, Ross's offices looked pretty clean to us.