Most of them come from the brands and the stores that sell their products. I go to a brand’s own product pages and manuals for sizes, specs and warranty terms, and I read each store’s listing as well.

For planning a room, like how much space to leave around a breakfast nook table, I lean on the National Kitchen and Bath Association’s guidelines, Fine Homebuilding and Dimensions.com. A page’s Sources list, at the bottom, names where its numbers came from, with a link where there’s one.

If you came for furniture standards and safety listings, they’re folded near the end.

Have I used the things I write about?

Some of them, yes, and those pages come from living with them. We’ve slept on a Saatva Memory Foam Hybrid since it arrived in November 2025, and it’s just the perfect amount of firmness, where I don’t sink in and it supports my body.

My chair is a Eurotech Elevate I’ve used nearly every day since 2020, at a RightAngle Bonita desk in a corner of our den.

Everything else is researched from the brand’s own specs, the store’s listing and the reviews.

Every number on a page, and every claim about a product, gets checked against its source before it goes up. The writing around them is drafted with an AI writing assistant, from those sources and my own words, and nothing is published until I’ve seen the page and said go.

How does a product get recommended?

It needs a rating of at least 3.9 out of 5, from 50 or more reviews. A perfect score from a few buyers could be a great product or just a new one, and there’s no telling which yet. It also has to be in stock, since a pick you can’t buy doesn’t help you.

Office furniture sold through dealers is the exception, and it’s the kind I sold from 2016, to schools, nonprofits, healthcare clients and companies. It doesn’t collect consumer reviews the way a sofa on a store site does, so I go by what’s published instead:

• In stock at a dealer you can buy from
• Listed in the standards register kept by BIFMA, the commercial furniture industry’s trade group, if the brand takes part
• A UL, ETL or CSA safety listing, if it plugs in
• A warranty in writing that spells out what it covers

Those years of selling it taught me what holds up. You see what comes back damaged, and you hear what people complain about six months in.

Why do the buy buttons just say View?

Stores change their prices often, and Amazon’s rules don’t let a site like this one show Amazon’s price. So the buttons say View and the store’s name, which can’t go out of date on you.

The pick lists and tables leave prices off too, with “See price” where a figure would go. Any button you tap takes you straight to the product at the store.

Do I earn anything when you buy?

Sometimes. Some links pay me a commission if you buy, and a page with one carries a line right under its title. The affiliate disclosure explains how that works.

Once in a while, a company sends me something free to review, and the page about it says so under its title as well.

Every page also mentions commissions in its footer. A commission doesn’t change the price you pay.

Furniture standards, safety listings and air purifier ratings

What a BIFMA listing means. It means the company that makes the product tested it to one of BIFMA’s standards and published its own results in BIFMA’s register. BIFMA checks those results on paper, by auditing a random sample of test reports, and doesn’t test the chair itself.

The testing happens in the company’s own accredited lab or one it hires. Plenty of home brands take part, IKEA, Staples and Sauder among them. Eurotech, Ergotron and FlexiSpot don’t, and I don’t count that against a product, because joining is up to each brand.

Which standard to look for. On a desk, table or storage piece for home, look for X6.5, BIFMA’s standard for home office and occasional-use furniture.

X6.5 used to be called SOHO S6.5, so you may still see that name. On a chair listing, the one to look for is X5.1, the office chair standard, and X5.5 is its match for office desks and tables.

Safety listings. A standing desk or a lamp plugs in, so it should have a UL, ETL or CSA safety listing. You can search for one in UL Product iQ with a free account, in Intertek’s directory with no login, or in CSA Group’s product listing.

BIFMA has no standard for lamps, so for a lamp, the safety listing is the one that matters.

Air purifier ratings. AHAM, the home appliance industry’s trade group, keeps a directory of certified purifiers with each one’s clean air ratings and the room size it suits. Those figures can change from one edition to the next.

The AeraMax 90 had a pollen rating of 75 in the April 2020 edition and 87 in October 2023, and its manual still prints the 2020 figures. When a box and the directory disagree, the directory’s latest listing is the one to trust.

What if a number here is wrong?

Then I want to hear about it. Email hello@cornernook.co or use the contact page, and you’ll usually hear back in a few days.

If it’s wrong, it gets fixed right away. If it isn’t, I’ll show you where the number came from.

Of everything you could send me, a correction is the most useful.

I sold contract-grade furniture from 2016. More about who runs it.