Traditional and trendy: we outfit a picturesque room in a Tuscan-style California home with the newest technology to create a dream office

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by John Dickinson

We outfit a picturesque room in a Tuscan-style California home with the newest technology to create a dream office

California's Napa Valley is one of the World's Premiere sources of fine wine. It's also one of the most beautiful places on Earth: Golden, rolling hills surround a valley lush with vineyards replete with the wonderful homes and buildings of the valley's vintners and their businesses.

So when San Francisco designer Rise Krag called on HOME OFFICE COMPUTING to provide computer equipment for an office in a house in Napa Valley's Yountville, we jumped at the chance. We were thrilled at the opportunity to join a team of designers assembling a designer showcase house to benefit a Napa Valley area hospital. The real bonus was to show off some of the PC industry's newest technology in a wonderful setting, and to share the experience with you.

The house is newly constructed and designed in a Tuscan style to serve as a weekend retreat for the Mein family of San Francisco. Its focus is on rest and entertainment, but you can't really get away from business when you're a successful investor, so a working home office for Gardiner Mein was a must. Fortunately, the architects had the insight to give this particular room what is easily the best vista of the surrounding vineyards from anywhere in the house.

Krag is known for her relaxing yet hard-working offices, and this one is no exception. The faux-finished walls and relaxed window treatments match the house's Tuscan style. The furniture is 19th century in origin, with a heavy worktable that comes from Colonial India and a supply cabinet that was once a pie cooler in the kitchen next door. The very modern Herman Miller Aeron desk chair may at first seem out of place, but its design is so timeless--and its comfort so helpful to hard work--that it quickly blends in with the rest of the room (888-520-7646, www.hermanmiller, corn; $999).

Regardless of the origins of the furniture and decor, this showcase office is well prepared for serious computing. Its infrastructure includes an ample number of surge-protected power outlets; separate telephone, fax, and data lines; and a jack to plug in a high-speed cable modern when cable-based Internet connections become available in Napa. With that much going in, our computer configuration had to be up-to-date.

We started with Gateway's G6-400 tower, powered by a 400MHz Intel Pentium II processor. It's helped along by 64MB of RAM, a 10GB hard disk, a DVD drive, an Iomega Zip drive, a 56Kbps modern, and a Microsoft IntelliMouse (800-846-2000, www.gateway.com; $2,652). The computer comes with Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Office Small Business Edition, and Internet Explorer 4.0 preinstalled. All we had to do was add peripherals.

We included one of our favorite monitors, ViewSonic's VPA138 flat panel (800-888-8583, www.viewsonic.com; $895). Even though Mein's worktable is huge (70 by 45 inches), desktop space is critical in any home office, and the VPA138 takes very little of that while still delivering crisp images on its 13.8-inch LCD screen. Besides, the VPA138 includes speakers, which allowed us to save more desk space by stashing the Boston Acoustics multimedia speakers that came with the Gateway.

We came up with two choices for hard-copy output. One is Hewlett-Packard's OfficeJet 710, an update to the 610 multifunction machine that retains the latter's color printing, scanning, and copying services but adds color fax support to the mix. It costs $100 more than the 610, but that's a expense we can easily justify now that color faxing is a reality in business (800-752-0900, www.hp.com; $599). The other, Lexmark's 5700 Color Jetprinter, offers 1,200 by 1,200dpi output that trumps many laser printers', at up to 8ppm in black and 4ppm in color (800-LEXMARK, www.lexmark.com; $249).

You wouldn't think security is much of an issue out in the country, but the sensitive nature of Mein's business led us to add a fingerprint recognition device to keep nosey guests out of the computer. We selected Digital Persona's U.are.U for its superior recognition software and to take advantage of the Gateway's Universal Serial Bus port (877-378-2738, www.digitialpersona.com; $149).

Today, no office is complete without a cellular phone, and Qualcomm's Q phone filled the bill just fine. Its miniature flip-phone design keeps it handy when a walk through the vineyards is the only way to solve a problem (888-236-2746, www.qualcomm.com; $549). And how could you be in such a place without a camera? The new digital cameras are getting so good that it was hard to decide, so we picked two: the Sony Mavica FD71, which includes a floppy disk drive to store and transfer its photos (800-222-SONY, www.sony.com; $799) and the Kodak Digital Science DC260, which uses CompactFlash cards for image storage (800-235-6325, www.kodak.com; $999). Both cameras feature zoom lenses, LCD preview and editing screens, and wonderful ergonomics.

And what would life be like without the latest laptop to take back to San Francisco or on the plane ride to New York? Again, the decision was hard and we chose two. First came the Mitsubishi Pedion (on the cover of this issue), which, at 5/8 of an inch thick, is about the thinnest full-size notebook around. It features a 233MHz Intel MMX Pentium processor, a 12.1-inch active-matrix screen, and the thinnest keyboard we've ever seen (888-445-5250, www.mitsubishi.com; $5,999). Then we brought in Toshiba's latest Portege 7000CT (in opening photo), which swaps the previous Portege's stumpy shape for a thin, flat profile. Its 12.1-inch LCD sits in front of a 266MHz Pentium II processor, and its keyboard is possibly the best we've seen in this new generation of thin laptops (800-TOSHIBA, www.toshiba.com; $3,699).