Refactoring my apartment

In the beginning
I didn't have any furniture.  We (my wife and I) had a blank, one-bedroom apartment in New York City.  For the living room, we thought, let's get the essentials and fill out things as we needed.  This consisted of the following items:

television
television stand with storage
couch
dining table
and some bookcases.

Multi-purpose sucks
One item we did not invest in was a desk.  I thought to myself, if I got a desk, then it would encourage working from home.  This was something I was already doing, and I didn't want to do more of.  So, whenever I had to do work at home, I worked with my laptop from my couch or dining table.

However, things have changed, and I want a desk now.  Working from a couch is ergonomically crappy.  Working from a dining table creates a lot of clutter.  Finally, while I still don't want to take my work home with me, I do want to work on this blog and work on my Android apps.  So, I'm in the market for a compact, functional, clean, good-looking desk.

The search is on
I am looking for a desk that is less than 38 inches wide.  I plan to put a big monitor on the desk.  I also want to plug in a laptop into the monitor, so that I can work on a nice big screen.

One candidate is onelessdesk from heckler design. It is the perfect width, but in its ambition to be as sleek as possible, it looks like using the desk to do some other tasks, like writing with pen and paper, is difficult. 

Some other candidates that are all a bit too wide, are listed below.
http://myturnstone.com/products/bivi-table-for-one-with-back-pocket/
http://store.hermanmiller.com/Products/Airia-Desk
http://www.bluelounge.com/products/studiodesk/

I have also been considering re-purposing one of my bookcases into a desk area, but that might be more multi-purposing that I'm looking to get away from.  

Lessons learned
I am not good at picking furniture.  If you know what you want, in particular the name of the piece of furniture, it's pretty easy to find anything.  If you only have an idea of what you want, then searching for furniture is hard.