After 20 years of writing about garden offices I thought I'd heard every portmanteau description (I still like 'shoffice') but in the i newspaper this week there's a new example, the coffice, so-called because the owner describes it as very narrow and a bit like a coffin (pictured above). It's actually very nice inside. Read more at 'We built a £13,500 garden office. It saves £500 in monthly mortgage costs' where you can see some interior shots.
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Two festival fineries this week for you, the first Le Festival des Cabanes which is an annual openair architecture festival held in the Sources du Lac d'Annecy region of Haute-Savoie, France including the municipalities of Chevaline, Val de Chaise, Doussard, Giez, Lathuile, Saint-Ferréol and Faverges-Seythenex. Showcasing a range of international architects and their wooden cabins (some of which are pictured above), it's open until November 6.
Finishing on September 28 is the fifth iteration of the Villa Medici's Festival des Cabanes at its home in Rome. These comprise six original creations like the one pictured below.
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Baumhaus Office is a remarkable build from Munich-based Opposite Office which really puts the garden in garden office. It's essentially a titchy one-square-meter cabin halfway up a tree on the campus of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar which optimistically is designed for up to two or three architects ("the treehouse was calculated with safety factors generous enough to satisfy both physics and bureaucracy" say the designers). Features include a skylight which has a marvellous view into the canopy above. Lots more photos at the link above.
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An excellent case study from Malvern Garden Buildings focusing on the Studio Flat model owned by chef and writer James Strawbridge who uses it mostly as a garden office, but also as a gym, art studio, and general family relaxation zone. Here's what he says:
“I always wanted it to be multifunctional, but it has become even more versatile than I expected. It’s a rowing room, home-education classroom, editing suite, art studio and a place for banjo lessons. It feels like a proper extension of our home and gives us space for creativity, fitness, music, art, work and mental wellbeing. For me, it’s primarily somewhere to work and create. I can switch off by playing music or using the rowing machine, but it’s mostly a calm, productive space.”
You can read the rest of the interview and see plenty of interior and exterior images via the link above.
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Entering the structure, the visitor is invited to sit and allow themselves to hear the world. There is no programmed audio. Instead, what is heard is the rustling of leaves, distant footsteps, one’s own thoughts. Distinctly architectural, the work mediates between nature and shelter, solitude and collectivity. It asks whether hearing, as a deeper attunement to environment and the self, might reshape how memory is formed and proposes that sharing and building space requires learning how to hear within it.
The whole thing is free for everyone to enjoy.
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Longstanding friend of Shedworking Nick Inman who is a long-term resident of France has started a short series about building sheds for the excellent connexionfrance.com site. Well worth a read and you can catch up with it here.
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