The Herman Miller Coyl Standing Desk Is Built Just for Gamers

When you buy a “gaming” accessory, you’re often buying a product that offers a little more oomph—a few extra perks or advanced features—catered to gamers who spend hours clicking away, trying to win. They may not be particularly chic, but these gaming peripherals are all about maximization, whether that’s a gaming keyboard, a gaming headset, or a gaming mouse.

Gaming desks are now a growing category. These furniture pieces accessorize your game room or home office while also minimizing distractions, so gamers can focus on gameplay. They often are designed to match their accompanying gaming chairs and their distinctive race car seat aesthetic. Various gaming-focused companies like Secretlab and Corsair offer some of the more comprehensive gaming sit-to-stand desks on the market—even Ikea has a few—but now esteemed furniture brand Herman Miller is entering the fray through its sub-brand, Herman Miller Gaming.

The Herman Miller Coyl is the company’s first standing desk built for gamers. True, the company also sells Motia-branded gaming desks that were adopted after Herman Miller acquired the furniture company Fully. But this is its first in-house design, and it’s easy to tell the various desks apart thanks to the Coyl’s three main design elements: the trough, the coil, and the dial.

First, the trough. This is the giant space underneath the desk, towards the back, where gamers can store all those unsightly wires and cables that run from their peripherals to their gaming PC. Most standing desks today offer some kind of way to route cables through the desk, but that’s child’s play compared to this. Very much like Secretlab’s Magnus Pro desk, the trough is unusually wide to accommodate plenty of cables and power strips. What’s also nice is that you can raise the desk to its max height and pull down the felt cover to access the trough from the front, like a mechanic working on a car, without needing to awkwardly fish for cables from the back of the desk or pull the whole desk away from the wall.

Then there’s the desk’s namesake, the coil: a distinctive red wire that runs from an outlet to the desk to power the motors and anything else you plug into the integrated power strip. It’s an intentional design. Rather than let the cable dangle as it awkwardly stretches to your outlet, the coil design keeps it taut.