Thursday, June 30, 2016

Garden office garden


If you're wondering how to bring the garden into your garden office, here's some inspiration from architects HOK London. Their new eco-friendly offices feature a large area of artificial grass where people can work or relax. It also has deckchairs and a picnic table. More about indoor shedworking here.
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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Rotating garden office cabin


As regular readers will know, the Shedworking staff are suckers for a rotating shedlike atmosphere and Telmo Cadavez's micro cabin - as featured on Tiny House Talk - is a beauty. Inspired by Portuguese wagons, it is made out of pine wood, cork (insulation) and covered with black slate, with quite a simple interior that features a double bed. Overall it's 8 m2. If you want to try one out, you can hire it on a visit to the Montesinho natural park. The video below shows it rotating. ----------------------------------------------------
Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Stable Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

KantoorKaravaan: Shedworking in the woods


KantoorKaravaan is an intriguing garden office project based in the Netherlands. A project by The Tipping Point Foundation, it's a series of mobile off-grid workplaces that tour National Parks and other rural areas, but still offers wi-fi, a kitchen, and compost lavatories (and a coffee-maker), all run off solar. There are apparently plans to expand into the rest of Europe and the US.

Founder Tom van de Beek told Fast Company: "These times of technological innovation and wireless connectivity provide us with the ultimate combination: getting back to nature and self sufficiency in terms of food and energy, and still be able to do our day to day business. In other words, we can now create the 21st-century equivalent of the Garden of Eden." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning

Monday, June 27, 2016

Man Cave - She Shed - Garden Office

An excellent timelapse of the building of Angus McGregor's garden office project over nine months. Most of the building was put together using recycled materials and much of it by Angus himself. --------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Visible Studio


A lovely two storey garden office by Invisible Studio made using untreated and unseasoned timber taken from the woodland in which it is built. Visible Studio is reached via a bridge. Interestingly, nobody who worked on the project had constructed a building before. Here's what Invisible Studio says about it:
The project was an exercise in establishing a system of building that could be constructed by unskilled labour, with minimal drawings, allowing ad hoc discoveries and improvisation to be embraced, and the tyranny of predetermined design to be escaped. The ‘mistakes’ of the unskilled team remain evident in the building, and no attempt was made to conceal them.
The scaffolding need for the build was then used to make the bridge, the windows were taken from a skip, and it is heated by waste wood from the woodland.
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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

European Men's Sheds


menssheds.eu helps support the development of Men’s Sheds and Men’s Sheds Associations throughout Europe. Regular readers will know that while the Men’s Sheds movement started in Australia it has spread to Europe and there are now national associations for the UK, and individual ones for Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are also plans underway to set up Men’s Sheds in Holland, Sweden, Finland and  Spain.
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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Hutmaker: Sheds and temples


Hutmaker is a new name in the world of garden offices and other shedlike atmospheres, or as they put it: "We make huts. And hideaways and places to party. Think-tanks and hermitages, love shacks and temples. Places to keep things in and space to let things go."

Pictured above is the Leaf Pavilion - ebony stained and treated timber patterned roof with cedar caps with a solid timber frame and floor. The CNC patterned wall panels come in half a dozen colour options and the whole thing is 5ft x 5ft x 8ft high to comply with planning regulations. Below is the slightly more oblong Birdsong Pavilion.


They also do really nice benches and arbours.


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Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Stable Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Rooftop garden office: Urban House


We've been writing about rooftop shedworking for years and Berkeley Homes new design - Urban House - suggests we may be seeing a lot more garden offices up in the air. The new design is a three-storey house, but with a private roof garden instead of a back garden (which means they can build twice as many homes as previously on a site). The first Urban Homes are up and running at Kidbrooke Village in Greenwich, London, and more will be up soon at Green Park Village in Reading. Its a modular build which means each house comes on the back of a lorry and takes just a few weeks to build. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning

MoonDragon: half shed, half house


Some marvellous mobile tiny house designs by American tiny house specialist Zyl Vardos including the MoonDragon (above - more interior pictures here) and the Ark (below). MoonDragon is 4m x 2.7m x 7.3m), clad in Onduvilla shingles, with walls made from mahogany ply, a cork floor is cork, and cedar tongue and groove ceiling.


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Tuesday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning

Monday, June 20, 2016

Wearables in the garden office workplace


The use of wearables in the workplace is not developing because of a lack of trust as people worry that their employer may use the data against them and not for their benefit, according to new PwC research.

Workers who would be happy to use a wearable device at work are most likely to want to trade their personal data in exchange for flexible working hours, free health screening and health and fitness incentives. Two thirds of respondents want their employer to help them to become more active.

The younger generation of millennial workers are the most comfortable sharing their personal data. Despite privacy concerns, six in 10 would be happy to use a work-supplied smartwatch and this rises to seven in 10 if they’re getting a better work deal in return. This compares to only three in 10 of workers aged 55 and over.

Technology such as a virtual reality headset, that doesn’t require the sharing of personal information but does offer benefits to workers such as facilitating collaboration whilst working from home, would be attractive to almost half of the workforce and six out of ten millennials.

Overall, only 46% of people surveyed say they would accept a free piece of wearable technology if their employers had access to the data recorded.

Even if this information is collected in exchange for workplace benefits, such as flexible working hours and working from different locations, the number of people who would use a wearable device at work rises to only just over half.
“Despite more people owning wearable devices, many people are still reluctant to use them in the workplace due to trust issues. Employers haven’t been able to overcome the ‘big brother’ reaction from people to sharing their personal data. Digital tools and analytics advances could be the key to unlocking a more engaged, happy and higher performing workforce - but first employers must gain the trust and confidence of their people to acquire, store and use personal data appropriately. If employers want to overcome the trust gap they need to show that they are serious about data security and communicate openly with their staff about the benefits for them.” 
Anthony Bruce, people analytics leader at PwC
Data privacy is the main barrier for those workers unwilling to share their information. Four in 10 say they don’t fully trust their employer to use it for their benefit and just over a third say they don’t trust their employer not to use the data against them in some way. Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

Rooftop shedworking in Germany


An old gondola used on the roof of an office in Munich as a breakout space. Spotted by Dan Jenkins. --------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

Friday, June 17, 2016

Log cabin home cinema


Awardwinning film audio expert David Crozier (The Hours, Harry Potter, Mission: Impossible) has built a remarkable home cinema - designed by Anders Uggelberg and Gerben Van Duyl - in a Norwegian Log Buildings log cabin in his Amersham garden. The build took three weeks.

Put together with the help of home movie specialists Pulse Cinemas, the garden office cinema features a top notch Procella loudspeaker system, Runco projector, and luxurious D-Box Motion Code Cinema Seating. There are more technical details about the install including soundproofing in Essential Install magazine (pdf) for anybody considering something similar.

 “I wanted a viewing theatre away from the main house," he told Homes & Property. "At times the small cypress tree outside gently quivers with the enormity of bass. My village friends still seem to be speaking to me so I guess the sound isn’t travelling much further.”
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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Jean Prouvé's demountable office


An excellent piece in Slate by Kristin Hohenadel (where there are lots of photos) looks at the intriguing garden office designed by Jean Prouvé. Prouvé was a 20th-century pioneer of innovative furniture and architecture, known in particular for his assembly systems for hardwearing structures which meant that buildings could be eailly dismantled, moved about and modified.

For the last 25 years, Galerie Patrick Seguin has been campaigning for recognition for Jean Prouvé’s demountable buildings - it has 23 - and his 1948 Maxéville Design Office where he worked on his designs is now on show at Design Miami in Basel until Sunday. Here's a video of it being re-assembled.
Jean Prouvé Bureau d'études Maxéville Design Office, 1948 from Galerie Patrick Seguin on Vimeo.

Here's what Galerie Patric Seguin says about it:
Intended as a demonstration model that would convince the public of the virtues of prefabricated housing, this was a copybook model: the use of the structural axial portal provides an open, fluid plan rendered highly adaptable by interchangeable partitions and one-piece glazed or solid facing panels. The house failed to find the success that had been hoped for and it was ultimately set up in 1952 at the Maxéville plant, where it became the Ateliers Jean Prouvé Design Office . After Prouvé’s departure in 1953, following fundamental differences of opinion with the majority shareholder in the Ateliers, the buildings bearing his stamp were demolished or demounted. The only one to remain was the Design Office , whose original panels were cladded over. It subsequently served as the premises for a heating company, a restaurant, and lastly the "Bounty" swingers’ club.
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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.

Spacetwo garden offices



Stockport-based Spacetwo were inspired to build garden offices by the cladding styles of farm buildings in Germany and now work in partnership withGerman wooden home manufacturers Chiemgauer Holzhaus. They use German or Austrian spruce, sustainably grown at high altitude and felled in winter as protection against frost and to increase durability. All the usual features come as standard and they are particularly keen on green roofs.


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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Outbox: The rise of the outdoor office


An interesting practical extension of the garden office concept is underway in Silver Spring in Maryland, USA, where development specialist Peterson Companies working with local Montgomery College has set up an outdoor workspace in the busy downtown area for the next few months. Open from 10am to 7pm, it seats 20 people and while it has free wifi, electrical outlets and a roof, is wall-less. So far it is getting heavy use and is often entirely full.



There's an interesting article about the phenomenon at The Washington Post and  Regular readers will remember our look at the Rooftop Workplace of Tomorrow garden at the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago.

Among others looking into the issue is designer Jonathan Olivares whose Outdoor Office research took a look at what kind of furniture would work well in non-interior offices.


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Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Stable Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Vreasy 'Garden Office'

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Tuesday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning

Artist’s studio in Devon


This oak painting studio - built mainly off-site and then reassembled - was designed for Lady Anne Field by Hoare, Ridge & Morris to sit in the Capability Brown-designed gardens of her home in Devon. According to the architects: "Its quiet palette of materials helps it to merge with its wooded backdrop in longer views, while its recessed façade allows the use of full glazing without glare in the wider landscape... Conceived as a contemporary folly or temple within the wider landscape, it sits somewhere between being a large piece of fine furniture and a garden building."

Those interested in building regs and permission will be pleased to hear that the design process involved extensive negotiation with English Heritage. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of which do not require planning

Monday, June 13, 2016

Garden office art


We've long known that sheds and art go well together,  and that research has shown that shedworking is healthy (indeed simply looking at plants reduces work stress and makes you feel less isolated). So we were interested to read Patrick McCrae from Artiq in onoffice magazine on the impact art can have too - he says research indicates a direct correlation between art and productivity and the inclusion of an art collection in a workplace leads to a quantifiable increase in productivity.

If you have art on the walls of your garden office, please email us photos of them and we'll show the world in a future post. --------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

Rock the Shack


Subtitled 'The Architecture of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs' this book from Gestalten will appeal to shedworkers, featuring cabins and huts as well as builds which are more like weekend holiday homes.


More from the publisher:
Rock the Shack takes us to the places we long for. For the first time in the history of humankind, more people live in cities than in the country. Yet, at the same time, more and more city dwellers are yearning for rural farms, mountain cabins, or seaside homes. These kinds of refuges offer modern men and women a promise of what urban centers usually cannot provide: quiet, relaxation, being out of reach, getting back to basics, feeling human again... The book features a compelling range of sparingly to intricately furnished cabins, cottages, second homes, tree houses, transformations, shelters, and cocoons. The look of the included structures from the outside is just as important as the view from inside. What these diverse projects have in common is an exceptional spirit that melds the uniqueness of a geographic location with the individual character of the building’s owner and architect.
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Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Upcycled garden office

Friday, June 10, 2016

Ceramic garden office



Ceramic specialist Lou Rota does a lot of her work from her garden office in London, designed and built by London Garden Studios. The Telegraph has a good piece about her upcycled home.




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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

A Woman's Huts and Hideaways


Subtitled 'More than 40 She Sheds and other Retreats', Gill Heriz's new book will be a must for female shedworkers. Suffolk-based writer and artist Gill works in a studio built from old flint. Here's the publishers' description:
An inspirational collection of stunning small spaces. Each place has its own story, a reason for being, whether it’s somewhere to escape, to create, to work, or just a place to “be”. By the Waterside, Ivy has built a mud hut near the River Willamett in Portland, Oregon—a place to “inspire and educate and share with her community.” In the Countryside Monica’s Cabin on the Hill is a writing retreat and provides a place for women who need time away from busy lives. A purpose-built shed in an Urban garden serves as studio for illustrator and artist, Martha. Hidden away, in an enchanting wilderness in Suffolk, UK, is Janet and Sue’s Secret Garden. Here, there are three sheds: an old summerhouse full of light; a hide nestled in the bushes for watching the local wildlife; and a renovated wagon used as a base for recording their wildlife observations. From yurts to Airstreams, beach huts to bothies, the huts and hideaways have one thing in common—they are all inspirational spaces created by women, for women.


There's a really good article about women and sheds by Gill at Living North. Here's a snippet:
Traditionally, women have taken time for moments of creativity within their demanding everyday lives wherever they could. They have always used small domestic spaces, and that sometimes included sheds, for their own practical and creative needs. These humble or not so humble sheds have, undoubtedly, been the places for inspiration, for the creation of novels, paintings, and the making of gardens. Going to the shed is both a physical removal of ourselves to 'another place', and a retreat to a space where our emotional needs are met and we can be ourselves. Our sheds are often the one place we can call our own and where we can do what we like!
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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

Thursday, June 09, 2016

George Bernard Shaw in his writing hut

See  our many posts about Shaw and his writing hut here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.