Executive Dump

High above the city, in the opulent aerie he modestly calls an office, the business executive of film and fiction does his skullwork amid trappings that would make Cleopatra's barge look like an excursion steamer. But in real life, the Executive Furniture Guild disclosed last week, the average executive suite is a dump.

In a survey of 1,000 executive offices in more than 40 U.S. and Canadian cities, the Guild found that the typical layout is "about as inviting as the inside of a boxcar, features drab beige throughout, vinyl tile floor, Venetian-blind tapes of a too-dark shade of brown. The massive oak furniture is awkward, outmoded and impractical. No draperies. Several unimportant pictures hang from the wall as if they had landed there by accident. Desk accessories coordinate with nothing. About the best that can be said is that it is clean and the furniture is in good repair."

Less than half the offices were carpeted. In 58%, "unattractive exposed elements" (meaning heating fixtures) are visible. In 72% of the offices, sniffs the report, cramped interiors do not even suggest the "acumen" or "importance" of the executive. Probable reason: in two-thirds of the offices, the decor (or lack of it) was perpetrated by secretaries, wives, friends and "other well-meaning nonprofessionals."

The cumulative effect of crooked pictures and uncorrelated desk accessories, reasons the survey, is to expose the executive to "countless minor irritations dripping constantly on the nerves." Since businessmen spend half their waking lives in offices, they soon "succumb, in the prime of life, to ulcers, nervous breakdowns and heart attacks." Well-designed furnishings, on the other hand, "pay off in the health, happiness and peak efficiency of the executive." They will also be around when his successor moves in.

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