Monday, February 28, 2011

Garden office music studios


We've covered many examples of garden offices used as music studios over the years here at Shedworking including Midge Ure's and this rather nice one from Roomworks. The Home Office Company is among those who have built music rooms for clients including Mr Turner, a member of a local jazz quartet and music teacher in Bromley who uses it to teach his students. Here's what they say about the build:
"With neighbours to either side and to the rear of his property, Mr Turner was very sensitive to the potential noise issues that teaching the drums or the saxophone might cause; consequently he spent a great deal of time sourcing just the right structure which would offer space, comfort and most importantly sound insulation. On his visit to our Charing Head Office, Mr Turner went inside the newly constructed Show Office and made ‘one heck of a din’ with his tambourine and saxophone whilst Mrs Turner remained outside to gauge the level of noise that the building allowed to escape."
Pictured top is a Garden Studio music room in Edinburgh from Maison d’etre Properties. Their models include vaulted ceilings and come with additional sound insulation in the form of soundblock wall board or Maxiboard™ acoustic wall board.

Finally, below is an example of a piano in a garden office from Garden Spaces
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Sunday, February 27, 2011

Interior shedworking: a critique


Tarek Merlin is Director and co-founder of Feix&Merlin Architects (readers will remember their Shed Gym as well as the Eyes Wide Shut beach hut). His thoughts on interior design on his blog post Is This The End Of Playtime (and on a couple of other architecture sites) make for interesting reading: essentially, he suggests that we should put the days of filling an office with beach huts and sheds behind us, referring in particular to Google's new London offices and (in more positive terms) Fat’s design for KesselsKramer (see photos above and below). Here's a snippet:
"It’s almost as if they’ve just bundled together all the tired ideas from the late nineties, (when the offices of the dotcom boomers were defined by ping pong tables and pizza and everyone was coming to work down fireman’s poles and getting around the office in slides), and just expected it to turn out well.

"Instead, it just looks a bit silly. A discombobulated collection of stuff and bloody nonsense, it looks more like a set for Play School than an office for an internet trendsetter (“and today, children, we’ll be going through the roundwindow”). Ironically, the efforts to provide a creative office design have resulted in an (over)eagerness to appear young and wacky, and it immediately looks dated and out of sync. A bit like watching your dad trying to dance to Lady Gaga."
Or as he puts it, "Simply shoving a beach hut into an office just doesn’t cut it anymore." It's an intelligent post and well worth a read.
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Saturday, February 26, 2011

Beach hut news roundup


The UK's first council-owned beach hut has been decorated with a blue plaque (pictured above). The hut, near Bournemouth Pier, was built in 1909 by F P Dolamore... Brighton and Hove City Council has asked beach hut owners to update their licences so they can only be sold to people living in Brighton and Hove. Prices for the 400 beach huts start at £8,000 and reach up to £12,000... Worthing and Adur councils have written to beach hut owners saying they will be charged 10% of the sale price or three times the annual lease of the hut if they choose to sell... A family in Yateley are raising funds for a memorial beach hut in honour of fallen Royal Marine Adam Brown. The £150,000 project will make the hut available as a place of respite for Marines recuperating from being injured in battle. More details at www.adamshoofinghut.com... Lyme Regis beach hut owners will be charged more in the future because each hut will now come with two chairs. The council will spend £4,000 on 70 chairs at £55 each...
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Friday, February 25, 2011

Deek Diedricksen's Microhouse

Deek won Shedworking's Best Design of the Year 2010 award for his Hickshaw and has now been profiled in the New York Times: Deek shows reporter Joyce Wadler around his marvellous microarchitecture structures (including the Gypsy Junker above) in an excellent piece that's well worth reading (and a great slideshow with photos by Erik Jacobs). Here's a snippet:
At about 24 square feet, the Gypsy Junker, made primarily out of shipping pallets, castoff storm windows and a neighbor’s discarded kitchen cabinets, is the largest of Mr. Diedricksen’s backyard structures. The Hickshaw, a sleeper built on a rolling cedar lounge chair (or as Mr. Diedricksen calls it, “a rickshaw for hicks”), is considerably smaller, at 2 1/2 feet wide by 6 1/2 feet deep. The Boxy Lady, two cubes on a long pallet, is the smallest: 4 feet tall at its highest point.

For ingenuity, thrift and charm, Mr. Diedricksen’s tiny structures are hard to beat. Made of scavenged materials, they cost on average less than $200 to build. They often have transparent roofing, which allows a fine view of the treetops, particularly in the smallest ones, where the most comfortable position is supine. They have loads of imaginative and decorative details: a porthole-like window salvaged from a front-loading washing machine, a flip-down metal counter taken from the same deceased washer. Mr. Diedricksen hates to throw anything away.
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Thursday, February 24, 2011

The Shedteau




Built in Berkeley, California for Laura Hartman by Christopher Peli at David Bers Architecture
Via Architizer
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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Exclusive: interview with shedworking author Joanne Harris

Writer Joanne Harris (whose hobbies in Who's Who include "quiet subversion of the system") is the author of numerous hugely popular novels including Chocolat, blueeyedboy and Five Quarters of the Orange as well as a book of short stories and various cookbooks. And she's also recently become a shedworker, documenting her life in the garden office regularly on Twitter where she is @joannechocolat

So we were deighted when she agreed to give an exclusive interview - featuring never before seen photographs of the inside of her garden office - to Shedworking about her experiences at the forefront of the alternative workplace revolution.

Why did you decide to start working in a garden office?
Because I needed somewhere away from the house, where I found that I had too many interruptions and distractions. Working from home is a tough thing to do: most of the time it doesn't feel like work at all; it's hard not to get distracted, and harder still to establish a proper routine.

What does it look like, inside and out?
It's a stone shed, built on the site of an original 1930s wooden one. It has windows all along one side to catch the sun, a roof made of reclaimed stone slates, a lovely slate floor and green oak gables inside. The green oak smells gorgeous. The stone is all local reclaimed stone, except for the lintels, which are new.

The door is oak, as are the window-frames. Although there are only windows along one side, there's a lot of natural light - light is very important to me, and it was built very much with that in mind. I have no running water, but I do have electricity and heating. I try to avoid distractions, so I don't have much in there except the bare necessities - not even a radio.

What do you like about shedworking?

I love the fact that I have a designated place to work. It means that I can "commute" to my workspace (even though that only takes a minute) and "come home" again at the end of the day. Psychologically it's very hard for a writer to ever disconnect from the process of working, and to have a proper space in which to work helps a lot. People know not to disturb me when I'm working there. I don't have wi-fi access or a phone, so there are no interruptions, except from the garden wildlife, which is plentiful, but which doesn't bother me. I have a great view of the garden, too.

Who built the office for you?

My husband Kevin organized it all for me, and the actual building was done by our regular builders, Dave and Adam, who have done lots of other work for us around the house and the garden. Dave is a very creative, imaginative builder and contributed a lot of his own ideas. We wanted something that would be in keeping with the house and wouldn't look out of place, so we decided to build it in the style of a weavers' shed; low, with a lot of little windows. A bit of a vanity project in some ways (and very posh, for a shed!) but so worthwhile.


Do you have any tips for anybody considering working from a garden office?

I think it depends on the person's job, and their prorities. I knew from the start that I wanted to proritize light and seclusion. Others may have different needs. Either way, decide what yours are from the start and work on making them happen.

What is your favourite shedlike structure?

I once stayed in a beach hut on Hawaii's Big Island. For me, it's the only shedlike structure that comes close to rivalling this one...
For more details about Joanne and her work, please do nip along to joanne-harris.co.uk
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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Inside Mahler's composing hut (video)


Gustav Mahler had three composing huts, as architect Keith Clarke describes in his groundbreaking study, Mahler’s Heavenly Retreats. Mahler had a particular aversion to noise – including birdsong, the barking of his architect’s dog, and the performances of nearby military bands – but also demanded that the servant who brought him his breakfast in one of his huts left via a route that meant Mahler would not see her so his train of thought would be undisturbed. “Mahler’s need for a place away from people and noise, for peace and quiet in which to compose his music, drove him to work away from his family,” says Clarke. “He arranged for the construction of workspaces, buildings built separately from his living quarters and constructed, one after another, in three different locations. They were created for him alone and visitors were not generally welcome.”

Mahler had composing huts at Steinbach (where the video above is shot), not far from Salzburg, where he wrote part of his second and all of his third symphony; Maernigg in southern Austria (symphonies four to eight); and Dobbiaco on the border of Italy and Austria (Das Lied von der Erde, his ninth symphony and sketches for the tenth). “Mahler’s Third, his Nature Symphony, is a celebration of the natural world in all its forms, its beauty, serenity and power, its comic and grotesque,” says Clarke. “The heavenly retreat at Steinbach, perhaps like no other, perfectly served Mahler’s needs. It was a laboratory for his art.” Director Ken Russell also made use of Mahler’s huts in his film on the great composer, including a scene where one of them gets burnt to a crisp.
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Monday, February 21, 2011

Video footage of George Bernard Shaw working in his writing hut


Here's a genuine slice of sheworking history, a long video clip of George Bernard Shaw at work in his writing hut from British Pathé which describes it as "excelent candid footage". It was shot on his 90th birthday at his home in Ayot St Lawrence just up the road from Shedworking HQ. Shaw comes out of his house, wanders down to his garden office, opens it, sits down and starts to use his typewriter. Click the image to go to the British Pathé site to view it.

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Sheds at the heart of new National Trust Garden Collection

The National Trust Garden Collection is a collection of high quality products for your garden. Here's what they say about it:
The items in the Garden Collection are produced by partners, specially chosen by the National Trust, with strong British heritage. Many of these companies still use traditional methods to craft their products and all contributors to the range support the National Trust’s values ensuring that their primary products are sourced from reputable, certified and sustainable sources.
The collection will launch at this year's Chelsea Flower Show 2011 and features not one but two shed/garden office suppliers, Crane Sheds and Summerhouses and Scotts of Thrapston whose range includes two models based on the garden offices of George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf.
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Sunday, February 20, 2011

Treeless treehouse


As we all know, children need sheds too. Here's a lovely example in spruce plywood, The Tree House, designed by Robert Potokar and Janez Brežnik, a wooden playhouse on stilts which doesn't need any trees to help it stand.
Via archdaily
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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Songs from the Shed for National Shed Week


The marvellous Songs from the Shed will be recording seven special sessions, one for each day of National Shed Week 2011. The artists involved have not yet been revealed but Jon Earl who runs Songs from the Shed has attracted some impressive folk to record in his shed so expect an eclectic range of musicmaking. More details at Shedblog.
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Friday, February 18, 2011

Hackney Shed scoops Small Project award



A lovely garden office designed by Office Sian in Hackney, London (they call it a "functional and warm urban haven") is one of the winners in the Architects' Journal Small Projects 2011 awards (another winner was Outlandia). It has fully retractable, full-height doors for a nice view of the garden and a rather cleverly designed library built into the structure. At the back of the shed is a hidden rooflight. The design was also shortlisted in last year's New London Architecture awards.
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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Henley Garden Offices: compact range (video)


A nice video extolling the virtues of Henley Garden Offices.
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Buy Sheds Direct launches Irish website

Buy Sheds Direct has announced the launch of a new ecommerce website to sell its extensive range of garden sheds in Ireland. Also available from the new Irish website will be the company’s range of garden buildings and garden storage products. Before the launch of www.buyshedsdirect.ie, Irish residents had previously been unable to take advantage of the company’s special web prices and its direct-to-the-door free delivery service.

Commenting on the new website, Amanda Smith, Head of eCommerce at Buy Sheds Direct said: “We were getting so many emails and calls from people in Ireland wanting to buy our products but we were unable to service the demand: we just didn’t have the infrastructure in place to service the Irish market. Selling is the relatively easy bit but making sure we get the delivery logistics and customer service quality right from day one had to be our priority. I’m pleased to say that we have achieved our aims.”
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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Viva Communications: shedworkers



Beth and Martin Whittaker run Viva Communications a public relations advisory service based in Stroud, Gloucestershire. They are also his 'n hers shedworkers as Beth explains:
"We worked in a room in our house for about 16 years before having this garden office built – it has seen us through two appalling winters and the builders [Green Retreats] have popped back a couple of times to batten down the odd hatch, all very amicable. Moving into the garden opened up a room in the house which my husband and business partner and journalist) now grandly dubs the 'music room' (he's in three bands in his spare time)."
They also have one of the loveliest shedworking views from their garden office we've seen on Shedworking...
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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

BubbleTree: seethrough garden offices




Bubbletree is technically a completely seethrough tent for campers who don't mind being rather exposed to the outside world but would work well for shedworkers who were also happy to have a different kind of garden office wall. Here's what the designer Pierre Stephane Dumas says about them:
"Bubble huts are like an ataraxics catalyst, a place apart where getting rest, breathing and standing back. Thanks to its geometry and its working principle, hosts can benefit from an amazing acoustic effect. Noises coming from the outside are reduced and noises coming from the inside echo towards the sphere´s hub. This echo drives people to speak quietly bringing about a feeling of appeasement favorable to have a nap."
The 4m diameter sphere which comes with a wooden floor keeps its pressurised bubble shape thanks to a silent blower/pump and filter which apparently also helps to avoid moisture problems and allows air renewal. You'll be relieved to know that the special plastic is reinforced with an anti-fire and an anti-ultraviolet rays agent.
There is also a treehouse version which is much less seethrough but still rather lovely.

And here they are in action...

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Heather Bestel - shedworking tip of the month

This month, Shedworking's Calm Editor Heather Bestel says be accountable...
By this stage of the year you’ve probably forsaken your well intentioned New Year resolutions, but what about business goals for the year?

One of the most powerful tools to keep us on track with our business goals is an accountability buddy, someone to cheerlead and give us the proverbial kick up the behind when required. But being a shedworker traditionally means you’re more of a loner who doesn’t have a posse of office colleagues on hand with the motivation when most needed.

Fear not. Get online and find an accountability partner. Useful people could be forum buddies, former colleagues, members of networking groups (on and off line) or Twitter and Facebook friends. Anyone who has a business goal themselves and is willing to check in with you on a regular basis can be your accountability buddy.

Simply break down your goal into manageable steps - set your task for the week, share it with your accountability buddy and off you go. Checking in on a daily or weekly basis to see how you’re getting on. There’s nothing like not wanting to lose face to give us some motivation.
More stressbusting advice from Heather at her site here.
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Monday, February 14, 2011

Suzanne Husky: Sleeper cell

An intriguing collection of work by artist Suzanne Husky who built what she calls her 'Sleeper Cells' for a recent exhibition at Recology in San Francisco which focused on providing a small but safe home environment. Suzanne is also interested in living off grid which she talks about in an interview with KQED Arts. Here's a snippet:
"In a broader way - those people who decide to live off the grid and sculpt their houses with recycled material - what I want to highlight is the philosophical choice of living with almost nothing, and being happy with almost nothing. It's the aesthetic of simplicity and poverty that I like to highlight as well. So that's probably more the social aspect of globalization, or one of the choices of how to respond to globalization, more generally than just environmental crisis."
You can see more of her shedlike structures here and Sleeper Cell photos at her Flickr page here.
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