Standing Desks

Our search for the world’s best standing desks

It’s many years since we were introduced to our first standing desk. In truth, it was a bit underwhelming. A bit rickety. A bit noisy as it raised and lowered. A bit meh.

We tried alternatives. You know, the standing desk converters that turn a sitting desk into a standing one through a sort of gantry-type assembly that looks like you’ve gone mad with a box of Meccano. Then we realised that once you’ve set your standing desk converter up you’re stuck with it—a permanent, slightly weird addition to what used to be a perfectly decent sitting desk. We ditched desk converters after that.

By that time, the technology and the science were improving. We stood at some amazing workstations. Then, a few months down the line, we’d stand at another that became our new favourite. Just as we thought we’d found the state of the art, the state of the art went and changed on us. It made us realise that we’d been limiting our expectations.

Then the market exploded. There were cheap worktables that couldn’t even justify their limited prices. There were incredible design-led premium models that were frequently magnificent if only you had disposable income equal to the GDP of a small country. And then there was that middle ground—a space for people serious about ensuring the space they worked at was healthy and productivity inspiring, but who didn’t have money to burn.

Into this market flooded lots of overpriced and underperforming models that, frankly, annoyed us. We believed we could do better. That’s when we decided to make a sit stand desk we could feel proud to call our own.

Finding FRISKA

We looked at what really mattered: weight capacity, because almost no one works at a single monitor anymore and iMacs weigh a tonne. Height settings (and height range) because a standing desk that suits only one person’s ideal sitting or standing position isn’t much use. Above all else, sturdiness, because we realised that the thing that bugged us more than anything else about adjustable workstation design was that weird bounciness that creeps in when you’re stood at a work surface made to anything less than the tightest tolerances.  

We sourced the best, sustainable desktop materials. We went to Sweden to meet the best frame manufacturers on the planet, who also happened to use the best steel on the planet. We kept things (relatively) close to home because we realised that banging on about our sustainability and then shipping everything from China was probably a bit rich.

Then we added lots of customisable extra features from monitor arms to cable management tray to four memory presets (to make adjusting the desk’s height quick and simple).

Finally, we spent a lot of time living with our creation, adding multiple monitors, a desk lamp, an unreasonably heavy pot plant and lots more weighty desk paraphernalia, all to ensure that, sitting and standing, it delivered a great, stylish and robustly sturdy experience. Happy that we were heading in the right direction, we expanded the range with a corner desk for offices with enough room for it and a micro desk for smaller spaces.

Since then, our range of adjustable standing workspaces has grown quite a bit.

Meet the FRISKA family

It’s a big range, so what’s the difference between one FRISKA and another? Here’s our quick guide:

Stockholm: The daddy of them all, it’s still the most popular of our electric standing desks. And from uncompromising sturdiness to lifting capacity to choice of desktop finishes, it’s easy to see why.

Stockholm Extra Heavy Duty: That word ‘extra’ is important because every Stockholm has an impressive lifting capacity (yes, even the Micro). It’s just that the Extra Heavy Duty has super-sized weight capacity that enables it to lift up to 160kg. That’s enough to carry a western lowland gorilla, apparently. Or a giant squid. To be honest, we haven’t tested it out on either, but if you have a giant squid going spare do give us a call.

Stockholm Micro: It’s funny to think that we once wondered whether there’d be any real need for the space-saving bijou-ness of the Stockholm Micro. Then a pandemic happened and suddenly lots of people found themselves working from home, with a desperate need for a proper workstation (ie, not the edge of the bed) but without the room for anything massive. The Micro fit the bill, enabling them to squeeze a great uplift desk into a hallway, spare bedroom or corner of the lounge.

Stockholm Corner: It’s an Extra Heavy Duty Stockholm in an L-shape with a triple motor lifting system that gives it the extra oomph it needs to hoist that mighty desktop swiftly and near silently. Although it’s designed to fit in corners, if you really feel like putting it somewhere else we won’t stop you.

Stockholm Signature: You know when someone utterly reliable and dependable has a makeover and suddenly you see them in a whole new, sexier light? The Stockholm Signature is a bit like that. All the performance of Stockholm, but with a choice of frankly even more gorgeous frame finishes.

Aspa Executive: You’re prepared to accept that switching between sitting and standing may be the way to go for a healthier and more productive working day. But you’re the sort of person who likes your sit stand desks to look like sit stand desks should, and that means the traditional four legs, thank you very much. Consider it done.

Just to add to the luxury, in addition to the ‘standard’ desktops (inverted commas very much intended), you can also have your Aspa in any of the Ultimate styles below.

Primo Designer: One day, our designers came to us with this. We sat on it (the design, not the desk), unsure if it was genius or insanity. Now? With those dashing outriggers, we think it’s possibly the coolest piece of office furniture we’ve ever seen. Turns out lots of other people do too, including GQ.

Just to add even more distinction to our most design-led desk, you can combine the Primo frame with any of the Ultimate desktops below and revel in the fact you have a better workstation than anyone else you know.

An even finer FRISKA?

How do you make the world’s best standing desks better? We’ll admit, it wasn’t easy. But then we thought about things from your perspective. We imagined you sitting at your worktable, then adjusting your desk’s height so it was just right. We imagined you reading, typing or Zooming away. And then we imagined you thinking ‘I love my FRISKA, but I’d love it even more if it smelled of real wood/if I could feel the knots and gnarls of its history/if it was virtually indestructible’.

So we took our collection of mighty frames and added desktops that delivered all of the above. And because we couldn’t think of any way we could possibly top that, we called them our Ultimate range.

• Ultimate Endurance: Real wood without the compromises of real wood. We wrapped a wood veneer around an MDF core, so you don’t need to worry about the warping, splitting and distorting that can affect solid wood, yet it still feels luxuriant.  

• Ultimate Character: We tend not to make a habit of harping on about the smell and feel of our desks because they’re, well, desks and most of us don’t spend a lot of time sniffing and stroking our office furniture. But we’d make an exception with Character, a sensory joy that makes work a better place to be.

• Ultimate Vintage: Before they were part of our products, the wood in every Vintage was used as scaffolding board. It means that, even after we’ve stripped, sanded and oiled away the years of toil, each desktop retains a heritage you can feel in every dent and knot. And while every FRISKA desktop is sustainably sourced, the Vintage is our most sustainable desktop, because it doesn’t use any virgin materials.  

• Ultimate Privilege: Our highest of high-tech work surfaces that’s so clever it can even heal its own scratches. Fingerprints don’t linger. Glare is banished. It even shuns bacteria (or, to be more correct, bacteria shun it). Privilege can’t yet make the coffee yet but we’re working on it.

What makes a FRISKA one of the world’s top standing desks?

It all comes down to the build quality, and the sort of obsessive attention to detail in our assembly process that makes a good desk great…

Sturdiness: We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this over the years. Of course, every manufacturer promises sturdy construction, but the reality is ‘sturdy’ can be a pretty broad spectrum. We wanted to make a stable standing desk that felt as rock solid as it’s possible to find. Here’s what we did:

• Sturdier desktops: Comparing? Remember to check the depth of the desktop. You’ll find ours are frequently at least half a centimetre thicker than the competition. That may not sound like much, but it creates a work surface that just feels more solid and robust.
• Stronger support: As you continue your adjustable workstation research, you’ll find two types of suppliers. One is the generalist retailer that sells everything office related or furniture related. They need a standing desk in their range not because they have a mission to advance the state of the art, but simply because everyone else sells them.
• Then there’s the specialist manufacturer, like us. The difference between the two types is that a manufacturer makes decisions based on what results in the best sit/stand experience and then works out how much that should cost. A supplier makes decisions based on achieving a certain product at a certain price point. That leads to lots of compromises, not all of which are immediately obvious. Our workstation tops, for example, fix to a U-beam. It’s like a girder that helps keep the entire construction solid. Most other desks don’t use a U beam because that increases production costs. Most (like the Fully Jarvis) use a sort of ladder assembly (usually quite a thin one). It’s ok. But it’s not the best option.
• Tighter tolerances: ‘Tolerances’ effectively means how rigorous our construction methods are, and what level of variance is acceptable to us. A great example of that is with the telescopic legs that rise and lower when you change the height settings of your desk. To ensure each leg can rise smoothly, you’ll find a plastic insert between each section. In a FRISKA, those inserts are tailored to each leg to a tolerance of a few fractions of a millimetre. That means there’s enough room for the mechanism to glide freely, but virtually no space for wobble to creep in.
• In almost all our competitors’ products, those inserts aren’t tailored. They’re standard sizes, which means tolerances are greater. At maximum height, it only takes an extra millimetre or two to impact sturdiness.
• More fix points: It’s only a simple thing, but we made sure the frame attaches to the top at more points, reducing the risk of bounce and vibration.
• Chunkier fixings: Each screw and bolt are a millimetre or two thicker than most of FRISKA’s competitors. And when you secure each part to the next with heftier ironmongery, you get a sturdier end result.

Lifting capacity: Even our Micro sit stand desk has a lifting capacity of 120kg, enough for virtually anything you’re ever likely to throw at our most compact workstation. Our Extra Heavy Duty has a weight capacity of up to 160kg (comfortably enough to carry multiple monitors, CPUs, printers and more). That puts it among the very best in its class.

Height range: The beauty of an adjustable workstation is that you can play around with memory positions to preset your preferred height. If you sit or stand within anything like an average height range, you’ll always find your work surface is easy to tailor to your needs.

But what if you’re at the edges of that height range? That’s when it really pays to do your homework, because the way a desk is made (in particular, the number of telescopic sections within a leg assembly) will affect the maximum and minimum height you can achieve.

Most of our FRISKA desks have a height range of 620-1300mm. You might imagine there wouldn’t be much difference between one product and another, but there’s actually more than a 130mm difference in range between our Stockholm and one of the top selling budget tables produced by a popular Swedish flatpack company. That doesn’t automatically make it a bad desk, but it does mean, if you tend to be a little on the short or tall side, that you’ll want to dig a little deeper into the specs to make sure your sit stand experience works for you. With a FRISKA, there’s always a greater chance that it will.

Speed: When you’re moving from sitting to standing heights you don’t want to wait a week for your desk to catch up with you. Nor do you want it to spring upwards so fast that it threatens to launch your screen into space. Most of our height adjustable workstations are powered by a dual motor lifting system and most move at 42mm per second. It means your desk glides upwards with a smooth urgency without ever feeling panicky.  

Noise: Let’s be honest about this: no desk is so noisy that you need to put on your ear defenders before you raise it (and if yours is that noisy you should probably get it looked at). Noise is a matter of degree, but those degrees are important, as you’ll know if you’ve ever found yourself irritated by some low hum or high-pitched whine somewhere near your workspace. Most of our FRISKAs clock in at an officially whisper-quiet 38dB (that’s according to the American Academy of Audiology (AAOA)). Many of our competitors’ products are also quiet, but they’re not quite as quiet as a FRISKA. 50dB, the level quoted by several other manufacturers, is about as loud as moderate rainfall (according to the AAOA).

No, that won’t exactly require your colleagues to scream at you to be heard above your desk as it adjusts. But it could just be enough to prove an irritant to those around you, especially if you switch between sitting and standing with a degree of frequency.

Greater customisability: We created the FRISKA range to ensure there really is something for everyone, whatever their size, shape and preference. Yet what if you want more? Suppose you want to place your monitor on a shelf rather than an arm? Suppose you want a lockable drawer, a cable management tray, an under-desk CPU holder or castors?

Suppose despite the fact your Stockholm has 18 desktop colours to choose from, you want pillar box red, canary yellow or British racing green?

To all the above (and so much more) our response is: you can do that (apart from standing desk convertors – we still don’t believe in those).

Find a huge range of customisation options when you buy online. And if you want something really out of the ordinary—in terms of shape, size or colour—just ask.

Specifications quick guide: Here’s a quick table covering the FRISKA Stockholm, Aspa and Primo ranges. For Ultimate models (which pair specialist desktops with Stockholm, Aspa and Primo frames), please see individual product descriptions.

Sit stand that leaves the others, er, standing

The smart people who tend to choose a FRISKA desk never do so on a whim. They are researchers and review scourers. They appreciate quality and have an impeccable eye for style, but they also expect to get a lot of desk for their hard earned £ or €.

They compare their preferred FRISKA with the competition: a Flexispot desk here, a few Jarvis desks there (you can read a full comparison of the FRISKA Stockholm vs the Fully Jarvis here. And if you’d prefer a completely independent review, take a look at this video comparing Stockholm stability with that of the Fully Jarvis).

They know the difference between a budget standing desk and the sort of height adjustable desk that manages to deliver best in class stability, speed, silence and style for a reasonable price.

Most of all, they know quality when they stand (or sit) at it. Which is why so many of them leave us 5* reviews. 89% of our Trustpilot reviews are 5* (and all but two of the rest are 4*). On Google, we’ve had nothing but 5* reviews for years. Yes, we’ve won a sack load of awards and we’re grateful for every single one. But it’s the incredible feedback from our customers that really matters, and we’re really grateful for all of it.

Why choose adjustable standing desks?

It’s all about encouraging good posture (and eliminating bad posture). Does that mean you need to spend the rest of your working life stood at your height adjustable desk? No. Long periods spent standing are no better for you than prolonged sitting.

What matters is getting your body moving, and that means incorporating standing as part of your working day, rather than banishing sitting altogether. It’s the shift between sitting and standing that pays dividends, and that’s why desks with adjustable height settings are kinder to your body, your productivity and your overall wellbeing than sticking with your existing desk.

Find more about the benefits of movement

Sustainable FRISKA

“Do you do sustainable bamboo?” We get asked that a lot. We don’t actually. That’s one of our competitors. Why don’t we do it? Well, it’s true that bamboo can be very, very sustainable. But that’s only applies if you grow it and make it close to home. When you have to ship it halfway around the world it turns out not to be especially sustainable at all. Plus, using all that bamboo for desks really annoys pandas.

Our approach to sustainability is one that looks closer to home. Our frames are made in Sweden using 30% recycled steel. Our desktops are manufactured in the UK from FSC certified forests. Simple.

Find your perfect FRISKA now. Explore the range and, if you have any questions, we have real, live human beings at the end of our live chat service (you’ll find it in the bottom right of your screen) or the phone. Give us a call or drop us a line.