Under Desk Pedestals: Small Drawers, Big Difference

Nobody has ever been excited about a pedestal. It is a box of drawers that lives under a desk, and it is the single piece of furniture people ask me about last and complain about first. Get the under desk pedestal wrong and you find out within a week, usually when the lever arch files will not stand up in the bottom drawer.

So here is the practical version, in the order the decisions actually come up.

Mobile, fixed or desk high

A mobile pedestal sits on castors and can be pulled out and shoved back. It is the default for a reason: you can move it when the office gets rearranged, and somebody sitting on it during a busy meeting is a feature rather than a fault.

A fixed pedestal bolts to the desk frame and does not wander off. Worth having in a room where everything gets moved constantly, or under a bench desk where a rogue pedestal would end up in the walkway.

A desk high pedestal comes up level with the desk top, so it doubles as a little extra surface at the end of a run. Handy in a small office where a side table would be one piece of furniture too many.

Two drawers or three

This one comes down to whether you file paper. Three drawers gives you two shallow ones and a deeper one at the bottom. Two drawers gives you one shallow and one proper filing drawer that takes suspension files standing upright.

The Impulse mobile pedestal is a fair yardstick for both. Its shallow drawers run from 8.5cm to 12.5cm inside, which is stationery, chargers and a stapler. The filing drawer is 32cm deep inside, at 33cm wide and 43cm front to back, which is where the suspension files go.

• Still handling paper contracts, invoices or HR files? Two drawers, and use the filing one properly.

• Mostly paperless? Three drawers, because you will fill them with things that are not paper.

• Sharing a desk between two people? Three drawers, one each, and the bottom one for the office.

Locks, and who holds the key

Most pedestals lock the whole unit with one key rather than drawer by drawer. That is fine for personal effects and fine for anything with names and addresses in it, which is more of your paperwork than you might think.

The part people forget is the key itself. Two come with the unit, both live in the top drawer, and within a month both have gone. Put the spare somewhere central on day one and write the key number down. Replacement keys are cheap and quick if you have the number stamped on the lock, and a small ordeal if you do not.

Fit, weight and the walkway

Measure the clear space under the desk before you order, not the desk width. A pedestal that is 56.5cm tall needs the desk frame to clear it, and a cable tray slung under the top can eat the difference. Depth matters too: 45cm deep under a 60cm deep desk leaves the drawers proud of the modesty panel.

Empty, these units weigh about 26kg. Loaded they are a good deal heavier, which is worth knowing before you promise to carry one up a flight of stairs on delivery day. Castors are for carpet tiles and hard floors, not for stairs and not really for thick pile.

Why the top drawer fills with cables

Every office in Britain has one drawer containing three phone chargers, a VGA lead, four USB cables of unknown purpose and a set of keys to something nobody can identify. It is always the top drawer, because it is the one you can open without moving your chair.

You will not beat this. You can only choose which drawer loses. Give the cables the shallow top one, keep the filing drawer for filing, and the pedestal will do its job quietly for the next decade. Ours come with a five year guarantee, which the drawers will comfortably outlast if the cables stay where they are put.

The full under desk pedestal range lists internal drawer sizes as well as external ones, so you can check a lever arch file will stand up before you buy rather than after.