Tuesday, April 05, 2022

Work From Shed: book review

When I published Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution back in 2010, there were very few books about sheds and none about garden offices. Since then, there's been, if not a flood, then a healthy flow of books about all aspects of #shedlife. But until now there's been nothing else dedicated solely to garden offices. Happily, the wait is over.

Work From Shed: Inspirational Garden Offices From Around The World comes from the excellent Hoxton Mini Press team of Ann Waldvogel and Martin Usborne, with text by Tara O'Sullivan and an introduction by architecture critic Rowan Moore. It's a fully illustrated hardback photobook, hand-pleasingly sized at 18cm x 22cm, printed on lovely high quality paper (indeed the book is carbon neutral) featuring an international collection of garden offices. The first half focuses on examples from the UK, the second looks further afield with selections from across the world (see below). Regular readers of Shedworking will be familiar with most, but certainly not all, of the builds, but that shouldn't put you off buying a copy because the illustrations are of excellent quality and numerous - there are plenty of full page and double-page images - and the short pieces of accompanying text provide useful details of key features, written in a friendly but authoritative way. Mercifully there's no unintelligible gushing.

This book brings the garden office story very much up to date, using very recent examples rather than dipping back into the history of shedworking (although we were delighted to see the iconic photo of George Bernard Shaw in front of his writing hut). It doesn't aim to examine the trend or make too much of the effects of the pandemic, but it is certainly an absolute must-buy for anybody working in a garden office, thinking of working in a garden office, or who doesn't yet realise that shedworking is the way forward in the 21st century. Also, they plant a tree for every copy of sold via their website.

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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

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