Thursday, April 30, 2020

Black garden studio


There seems no letting up in the popularity of black garden offices and studios. Here's a particularly appealing one by Hastings-based Johnson Bespoke (no relation) in Stoke Newington, London, for a printmaker. The designers have an interesting description of it: "We designed and built this high-spec garden room as an extension of the house, albeit one you have to walk across the garden to get to."



The inside is clad in light birch play, with underfloor heating, and specially-designed printing features including an apron hook and print drying rack. There's also a Belfast sink with hot and cold running water. On the outside, it is clad in burnt waxed cedar, with a remote-controlled 90 degree opening skylight.
 

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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, April 29, 2020

The Artist's Studio


An excellent garden office studio in London's West Hampstead - a collaboration between Amos Goldreich Architecture - which replaces an old garden shed proves again that you don't need an enormous back garden to become a shedworker. The timber frame is clad in corrugated metal which the designers say reflects the the light industrial buildings in the neighbourhood. Features include a green roof and skylights.

Lots more excellent photos by Ollie Hammick at the Amos Goldreich Architecture site here. --------------------------------------
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Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Treehouse kitchen garden office


The Pure Package is a gourmet catering business run by Jennifer Irvine from her 3m high Blue Forest treehouse in Surrey where she has an impressive open-plan kitchen for cooking, hosting cookery lessons, and meeting clients. Inside, it's about 6m wide with a vaulted roof and underfloor heating, while outside, there is a large decking area with views across the impressive gardens plus a long rope bridge for access.

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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, April 27, 2020

Shackadelic garden offices



Three of the Shedworking staff's favourite designs from London-based garden office and cabin specialist Shackadelic which was founded in 2011 by Chris Hodge, initially as an offshoot of a landscaping company and indeed they still offer a full landscaping and gardening service. We're particularly keen on the top design, used by a family of writers and illustrators and cleverly fitted into a small garden. Lots more lovely bespoke designs at their Instagram page.
 

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Sunday, April 26, 2020

Cressida Cowell's path to the writing shed in April


Children's novelist, current Children's Laureate, and contributor to my latest bookCressida Cowell is a daily shedworker. She also takes photos of the path to her writing shed garden office throughout the year. Pictured above is this month's late April entry and you can see what it looked like for example in February, May and October last year at the links or by searching the site.


And just a reminder that she is also reading her How To Train Your Dragon series out loud throughout lockdown, all from her garden office writing shed, as part of the BookTrust's new digital hub for families and children, Home Time. She is currently deep into book two. Catch all of the videos on her YouTube page.


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Saturday, April 25, 2020

Outpost by Dan Richards


Not strictly a book about garden offices, nevertheless Outpost by Dan Richards will be of considerable interest to many shedworkers since he takes a close look at shedlike atmospheres including Roald Dahl's writing shed and Roger Deakins' shepherd's hut. Published by Canongate who have this to say about it:
There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. These are landscapes that speak of deep time, whose scale can knock us down to size. Their untamed nature is part of their beauty and such places have long drawn the adventurous, the spiritual and the artistic.

For those who go in search of the silence, isolation and adventure of wilderness it is - perhaps ironically - to man-made shelters that they often need to head; to bothies, bivouacs, camps and sheds. Part of the allure of such refuges is their simplicity: enough architecture to keep the weather at bay but not so much as to distract from the natural world.

Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State, from Iceland's 'Houses of Joy' to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl's Metro-land writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists and musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?
Well worth considering.


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Friday, April 24, 2020

Katrin Eagle's Smart garden office


Lockdown seems to be inspiring shedworking artists and there is plenty of shed art around on social media at the moment. Here's one of the Shedworking staff's favourite recent pieces, a piece by wool artist, handspinner and designer Katrin Eagle who is based in Petersfield, Hampshire, and works out of a Smart garden office.



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Thursday, April 23, 2020

Join Joanne Harris today for a tour of her shed


The Society of Authors is running a special one-off event at 4pm today (Thursday) at which novelist Joanne Harris (perhaps best known for book Chocolat) will host a 45-minute online video session to talk about how she works, what she's working on now, and give a tour of her garden office. It will end with a Q&A from the audience (if you want to send questions in advance email sjackson@societyofauthors.org with ‘Afternoon Tea with Joanne Harris – Question’ in the subject line).

This event is free but you need to click onto the special Society of Authors link here and then fill in your details after which they'll email you with a link to join.

If you can't make it or just want a bit of background detail, we interviewed Joanne exclusively for Shedworking a few years ago.

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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, April 22, 2020

Dwellito



For those considering shedworking in the US and Canada, here's a new option, the Dwellito Mini-Office which promises "an end-to-end service that ships a pre-built office to your door in 6-8 weeks". It comes in three sizes - 8x8, 8x12, 8x14 - each with a full-side glass pane.
 
"Dwellito Mini Office is a product designed for the times," says owner Caleb Barclay. "We've been working (in our homes) to figure out how to offer mini-offices to those that need a legitimate work station. With all the distractions that comes with WFH, we wanted to create a alternative: a home-office, outside the home. So we decided on a design that met 3 criteria: bigger than a phone booth, enough to fit a desk, shipping under 8 weeks or less, price under $10k for most basic version."
 
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Wednesday’s posts are sponsored by Norwegian Log Buildings  - Log cabins and garden buildings for a better quality of life. Click here for more details.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Rooftop garden office



People often tell me they'd love a garden office but they don't have a garden. While that is indeed a bit of a hurdle, it's not an unleapable one. Here's a lovely example from Boundary Space at the very top of a London townhouse. They wanted to create something like an urban meadow and it really is something very special indeed. The garden office appears in the video below at the 1:07 mark.

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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, April 20, 2020

Upmarket garden offices


We don't normally include prices of garden offices on posts on Shedworking, unless they're absurdly cheap or ludicrously expensive (we make an exception for beach huts when they hit barmy figures like £300,000). The Sunday Times this weekend not only put together a remarkable hit job on Boris Johnson, but also included a feature on 'Garden studio ideas that will add space to your home and save you from upsizing'. Delightful though most of them are - and almost all of them have been featured on Shedworking previously - they're mostly in the £50,000-£100,000 bracket (and more like the top end of that). Nevertheless, if those sorts of numbers don't put you off, then the article is well worth a look (it's behind a paywall, but you can probably get it as your single weekly freebie).

Here's a snippet:
The open-plan home is taking a toll on family relationships during lockdown: when there are no walls, there’s no escape from each other, especially if you are WFH. Even before the restrictions came into effect, the architect Catherine Finkernagel, co-founder of Finkernagel Ross, was receiving a lot of calls about garden studios, and she believes the trend will take off after this period of cabin fever: “When you’ve got kids running rampant with their Nerf guns and Xboxes, it’s all too much. You need a space to retreat to.”
Our favourite was actually another build by Finkernagel Ross which we found while browsing their site, the garden office pictured above and below.


It multi-fuctions as a garden office, spare accommodation, gym, and home cinema, facing away from the house and with a Grade II listed park as a background behind the garden. Here's what they say about it:
"There’s a pace to this sort of project that we relish (and which makes a change from some of our bigger projects). From careful planning, through designing, procuring and building, the studio was up and ready in just two months. We needed a little more time to design the garden spaces around the studio, and now it’s just a case of waiting for the unsealed timber cladding to weather until it matches the bark of the trees behind. Soon it will look as if it’s always been there, at one with both the garden and the woodland behind."
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Sunday, April 19, 2020

Shedworking at BBC Radio 3



So much radio and television is being broadcast from people's garden offices at the moment, and at remarkably high quality too. Here is Radio 3's Sarah Walker in her music shed from where she's been broadcasting her excellent Sunday morning show. The final image is her view from the garden office looking back at her home. ---------------------------------------

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Friday, April 17, 2020

Justin Croakley: shedworker


It's interesting to see how the media is starting to go to town on garden office set-ups during the lockdown (as well as other working from home arrangements). I'm sure this will herald an uptick in new shedworkers after things begin returning to normal. Pictured above is a recent example in the Metro, profiling interior stylist Justin Croakley who works in a Malvern Garden Buildings studio. As you'd expect from an interior specialist, it looks splending, but the article also includes plenty of tips from Justin about shedworking from a garden office. Here's a snippet:
You need to strict with yourself, I find making sure I stick to a daily routine really helps. I always start my day off by compiling a list of things that I need to do and tick them off as I go along. A large part of helping myself be more productive is ensuring I plan ahead. There is something very empowering about being self-disciplined and getting the task at hand done. Another thing I find really helpful is disconnecting from my phone and any distractions of social media. I either turn my phone off or leave it in the house so that I can only check it when I go in for short coffee breaks.
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Thursday, April 16, 2020

Monty Don's writing shed


We have covered Monty Don's writing shed several times before on Shedworking but this is such a beautiful image from him this morning that we felt it would be nice to pass it on to readers as inspiration. Below, he takes us for a walk up his writing room path.
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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, April 15, 2020

Men's Shed produces vital face masks


Great to hear that the fine folk at Kinross and District Men’s Shed are doing their bit during the pandemic. Various news outlets have reported on how the shedders are making Polylactic Acid (PLA) face shields for key workers. Here's what KDMS chairman, David Connor, told Third Force News:
“KDMS wanted to help and one of our shedders, Jim Forbes, started working in his shed at home to come up with a solution to meet the demand for this life-saving protective equipment. The shedders have really stepped up and there is a team of around 12-15 of us involved in taking and recording orders, administration, printing, assembly, quality checks and delivery. More and more shedders are becoming involved each day to lend a helping hand to this cause."
With supplies running low, you can help keep their efforts going by donating via their Go Fund Me page.

The KDMS has created instructions and 3D Printer files (STL files and G-codes) and is more than happy to share these with other Men's Sheds interested in providing a similar service. --------------------------------------
Wednesday’s posts are sponsored by Norwegian Log Buildings  - Log cabins and garden buildings for a better quality of life. Click here for more details.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Archipod garden office on stilts



The leading spherical garden office manufacturer Archipod has a new model. It's a new type of 2.2m diameter 'mini' pod on stilts which will be used as a craft room for a teenager. Entry is via a circular hatch at the rear of the pod or - more excitingly - by an access hatch in the floor. Like the other models, it will be fully insulated with lighting, heating and power. Another new faeture are the interior curved painted panels which replace the usual plastered finish.

Click here for previous Archipod posts on Shedworking.

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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, April 13, 2020

Walden, shedworking, and social distancing


The Washington Post has an interesting article with one of those 'the story is in the headline' headlines, 'Walden may be the most famous act of social distancing. It’s also a lesson on the importance of community'. Here's a snippet:
Since the coronavirus quarantine began in the United States last month, tens of millions of us have begun something like Thoreau’s retreat, but with a better Internet connection. As the days accumulate into weeks and then months, the burden of remaining cloistered will surely grow more challenging. Thoreau went there before us. He knew there can be contentment alone just as often as there can be loneliness among company.
 More on Walden and Thoreau here.  -------------------------------------------------
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