Sheds in The Idler

The latest issue of The Idler is out now with my usual column about sheds inside (and also about snooker for those of you interested in baizecraft). It's a look at Shed lit, the books that every shedworker and shedowner will want to have handily on his or her bookshelf featuring the likes of Jane-Field Lewis, Sally Coulthard, Kathryn Ferry, Joel Bird, and Michael Pollan. Click the link above to find out more and subscribe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

George Clarke's Amazing Spaces

Just a reminder that the eminently watchable and microarchitectural Amazing Spaces series, which also features the work of stylist and friend of Shedworking Jane Field-Lewis, is on again on Channel 4 (and you can catch up on back episodes online here). The latest builds included a fantastic renovation of a sewage works and a lovely treehouse rebuild by carpenter and cabinetmaker Jamie Hubbard (pictured above) which even has its own Twitter feed @TheIvyTreehouse

Iroko floorboards cover the joists and insulation.. we forgot to mention @TheIvyTreehouse is insulated. This is before insulating the walls and lining. pic.twitter.com/uX40Ftlg78

— Jamie Hubbard (@jam73e) January 18, 2018

This Thursday an airline enthusiast turns a jet cockpit into a summerhouse and the week after a double-decker bus is turned into a luxury mobile home.

If living in a sewage farm sounds like your worst nightmare, you haven’t watched this... pic.twitter.com/HcMB9a0aDp

— Channel 4 (@Channel4) January 22, 2018

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Studio by Sally Coulthard: Book review + giveaway

It's hard now to imagine how dreary shedworkers' bookshelves looked before Sally Coulthard and Jane Field-Lewis - together their books have revolutionised not only how we see our garden offices and other shedlike atmospheres, but how we decorate them and personalise them (modesty prevents mentioning any other names in this regard...).

Sally's latest book Studio (subtitle: 'creative spaces for creative people', published by Jacqui Small) is another success and a definite must-buy for any shedworker's bookshelf. Indeed it should be on any homeworker's 'to buy' list because while it does feature shed studios, shepherds' huts, and converted garages, there is a huge variety of creative work and study spaces on show here, and across numerous countries too.

As with Sally's previous books (out of her long backlist I'm thinking especially of Shed Chic and Shed Decor), it's a handsome hardback volume with plenty of high quality illustrations (and on quality paper too which will please book buffs). But it's not just a coffee-table book - the text, especially the case studies and the interviews with artists, is very readable and useful in terms of sourcing materials, planning layouts, lighting, and so on. And to be honest, it's also quite intriguing to politely poke around other people's studios. Well worth a read.

We've also got a couple of copies to give away to two lucky readers of Shedworking. Simply email (or @shedworking on Twitter) the answer to this question by the end of March 2017 (usual competition rules apply):

Q. Name three types of creative space featured in Studio.

Below is a selection of studio images from the book. From the top (photographer in brackets): Emily Sutton & Mark Hearld (Alun Callender); Max McMurdo (Simon Brown); Sarah Campbell (Alun Callender); Martin O'Neill (Alun Callender).

 

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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.

The Anatomy of Sheds: book review

I hope you've got some space left on your shedworking bookshelf because here is another must-have from Jane Field-Lewis, hard on the heels of her excellent My Cool Treehouse earlier this year. Jane has written several excellent, small scale books on shedlike architecture but this is a weightier volume from Pavilion. Subtitled 'New Buildings from an Old Tradition', it features plenty of garden offices as well as other marvels of microarchitecture, around 50 in all, grouped under the headings of Backyard, Contemplative, Holidays, Workspaces, Studios & Workshops, Architectural, and Homes.

Some of these will be familiar to regular readers of Shedworking - such as Paul Smith's garden office - but there are plenty of examples which will be new to even the most hardened shedreader. Each chapter is, as always with Jane, nicely written, but the advantage of the bigger format is that the photos of each build can be given a really decent showing (the endpapers are especially lovely). It would be unfair to call it a coffee table book, but it would happily grace one.  If you bought and enjoyed Cabin Porn, you'll also like this. In fact you'll like it more, because it's better. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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my cool treehouse: book review

Regular readers will be familiar with the work of friend of Shedworking stylist and author Jane Field-Lewis who in her excellent 'my cool...' series of books has already covered sheds, houseboats, caravans, and campervans. Jane's latest title is 'my cool treehouse' (Pavilion, £14.99 with cracking photography by Tina Hillier and lovely endpapers) and it is arguably the best so far.

Subtitled 'An inspirational guide to stylish treehouses', the book takes a close look at more than 30 treehouses around the world, from incredibly simple ones that you can attach in an eco-friendly way to trees in a matter of minutes to cleverly recycled havens of calm and spectacularly complex modern versions.

"A treehouse creates its own world," says Jane, "its own atmosphere. It's a distillation of some of the values and qualities we cherish most. Resourcefulness, shelter, exploration, safetly, and romance, all entwined with an innate childlike desire for inhabiting something that is out of reach."

There are eight categories - simple, architectural, soulful, handmade, art installations, eclectic, businesses, and modern - and each treehouse is introduced and then analysed in a 'style notes' section. There's also a useful sourcebook at the end. Naturally, it's the businesses chapter the Shedworking staff were most interested to browse - our favourite were the off-grid treehouses created by Peter Canham in the Welsh mountains. Overall, a strong contender for shedlike book of the year.

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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.

George Clarke's (and Jane Field-Lewis's) Amazing Spaces - the book

A new series of George Clarke's Amazing Spaces starts tonight at 8pm on Channel 4 and it promises to be as intriguing as series one. To coincide with the first programme, Quadrille has also just published a book of the same name written by Mr Clarke and Jane Field-Lewis of My Cool Shed fame which we'd certainly recommend to readers of Shedworking.

Along similar lines to Ruth Slavid's Micro: Very Small Buildings, Sally Coulthard's Shed Chic and Phyllis Richardson's Big Ideas, Small Buildings series, it looks at a very wide variety of microarchitecture including familiar favourites such as beach huts, shepherds' huts, and garden offices (although what they call a 'schoffice' is surely a 'shoffice'?). There are extensive sections too on small buildings on wheels, repurposed and multifunctional spaces, and selfbuilds, and as you would expect it features plenty of examples from both television series in considerable detail.

Although it's not a 'how to' book, there is a huge amount of general and sensible practical advice (a minor quibble, it would have been useful to include some kind of 'where to go for more information' section for books, websites, suppliers, etc) and the standard of colour illustration is very high indeed. Indeed, the inspiring photographs - and there are huge numbers of them - are probably it's biggest selling point - it's easy to see how this would inspire readers to have a go themselves at thinking small. Certainly in the running for a Shedworking 2013 award.

Available from all the usual outlets but we'd encourage you to get it from your local independent seller.
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Amazing Spaces: the soundtrack

The intriguing Amazing Spaces series is back for a second round of microarchitecture musings next Thursday (in the first episode the focus is on a couple transforming a 1960s ambulance into a campervan). To whet your appetite, Jane 'My Cool Shed' Field-Lewis - who is one of the main brains behind the show - put together this rather nice selection of the music the production team listened to as they whizzed around the country looking for shedworkingesque structures. ----------------------------------------------------------

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Shedworking Awards 2012

We've been running our annual prizegiving for a mighty three years now, an opportunity to give a pleasant pat on the back to some of the finest achievements in the shedworking world over the last 12 months. It's been another busy year and so without further ado let's move towards the first gold envelope...

Best design – It’s been another great year for shedlike designs. Most recently, the Forest Pond House (one of the designs up for an award on the AJ Small Projects award) caught our eye, but over the last 12 months we’ve marvelled at tents which looked like sheds, caravans which looked like sheds, floating sheds, rotating sheds, and naturally sheds like hobbitholes. In the end, the winner is as much about concept as design. Custom Built Surrey run by Mark Burton, does produce some nicely built shedworking atmospheres but what Mark is really trying to do is raise awareness of the importance and advantages of tiny house living. In the USA the movement towards living small is really snowballing. In the UK, there are some meagre signs of its emergence, but if it takes off then it will be in no small part due to Mark. Nice work.

Best blog/web site – 2012 was the year that Pinterest really made its mark on the world of sheds with boards popping up all over the interwebs celebrating garden offices and other small design wonders. But in the main while these were a delight to browse, they largely involved simply scrapbooking other people’s work. So it’s ‘traditional’ blogs which have won the day this time round. In joint second place are two blogs which detail the design and build of garden offices, http://buildgardenoffice.blogspot.co.uk and http://buildingastudio.wordpress.com/. Which means that in first place is http://shoeboxdwelling.com run by design journalist Natalia Repolovsky. While not specifically targeting shedworkers, many of Natalia’s posts are perfect for those in garden offices since they feature transformer furniture, desks, shelving and storage in general, all in a succinct yet illuminating style.

Best Tweeter –  At its worst, Twitter is a platform for dullness and selfpromotion. At its best, it provides an insight into another world.  The @plankbridge feed from shepherds’ hut specialists Plankbridge was exactly this, always interesting, friendly without being imposing, frequently using photos and video to mix things up, and above all, genuinely reactive rather than simply using it as a broadcasting medium.

I'm framing up a Writers Hut, the smaller version that we do. It's going to be a craft studio for a customer twitter.com/Plankbridge/st…
— Plankbridge (@Plankbridge) December 22, 2012

Best popularisation of shedworking – A former Shed of the Year winner, it was not the smoothest of years for Songs from the Shed run by Jon Earl. But despite the challenge of financing arguably the UK’s leading music venue, Jon and his impressive list of invited musicians have brought us some tremendous sessions in 2012 (as regular readers will know since we often highlight some of our favourites on Shedworking), and in so doing underlining that shedworking comes not only in all shapes and sizes but also sounds. Help to keep them going by donating to the cause on their site.

Readers' Award – This year’s RHS Chelsea Garden Show had many sheds – and in fact a shepherd’s hut too - on display. Indeed there was a whole separate area devoted to them. But this year’s runaway favourite as nominated by you the readers (in second place was the appealing George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces television series, closely followed by Jane Field Lewis’s excellent book My Cool Shed) was Jo Thompson’s Silver Gilt-winning show garden which featured a garden office-ish caravan, at least partly inspired by the Shedworking blog. It was a lovely garden, a marvellous caravan, and Jo is a smashing lady. Congratulations.

Lifetime achievement award – Lloyd Alter is not a shedworker (though he does have a marvellous outhouse) but this has not stopped him from promoting this blog almost from the very beginning, as well as being a critical friend of what we are attempting to do with it. Many of you will know Lloyd from his work on Treehugger.com where he shares his deep knowledge of the world of architecture and passion for a sustainable lifestyle with a large readership. He writes well, he’s generous, and he has a fine sense of humour. He is, in short, a big hitter and it’s a privilege to have him on our side.

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Where are George Clarke's Amazing Spaces?

We've posted about this show quite a lot already but I know some of you are interested in finding out more about the builds and those taking part so we'll be pointing the way over the coming weeks. So, to kick things off is the Majestic Bus, pictured top. It's a "lovingly converted Panoramic Bus tucked into a garden riotous with flowers near Hay-on-Wye, and enjoying sweeping panoramic views over the Herefordshire countryside". It sleeps four in the bus and there's space for another four camping outside.

Looking ahead a bit to episode 3, Bamboo Ape are based in Bournemouth on the south Dorset coast and provid "bespoke design solutions and unique high quality builds that turn your small spaces into big places".

Here's one of their latest projects (and indeed the one featured in the programme), transforming a 1.7m square Bournemouth beach hut into a space to cook, eat, much about and sleep. And happily it also includes an office area so it's genuinely shedworkingesque.

And there's lots more information about the show at the site of its Creative Consultant and friend of Shedworking, Jane Field-Lewis. -----------------------------------------------------------------------

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My Cool Shed: Jane Field-Lewis (video)

Jane Field-Lewis talks to Matthew Cain, culture editor at Channel 4, about her new book My Cool Shed. Film by Ian Anderson and music by Lodekka (appearing courtesy of Freshly Squeezed Music). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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my cool shed by Jane Field-Lewis

A decade is a long time in shed books. Ten years ago, Gordon Thorburn's hugely successful book 'Men And Sheds' was published featuring an entirely male lineup of shedworkers, hobbyists and Suffragen Bishops, photographed by Laura Forrester in black and white (one per double spread), mostly unsmiling, all from the UK, and in very traditional sheds. It helped - as did the previous year's launch of readersheds.co.uk - to kickstart renewed interest in shedlike atmospheres.

Ten years on, and with Sally Coulthard's Shed Chic book in between, we now have Jane Field-Lewis's new book 'my cool shed - an inspirational guide to stylish hideaways and workspaces'. The huge number of photographs are in full colour, the sheds are from all over the world, and the sheddies are both male and female. There's even a sourcebook at the end to help you get the look as well as gorgeous endpapers (see image below). The term 'shedworking' is now used without explanation. Much has changed.

my cool shed is split into several sections looking at artists, musicians, retreats, gardeners, writers, workspaces and time out. Many of the people featured are shedworkers (indeed plenty of the 35 garden offices and sheds featured have appeared on this blog or in the Shedworking book) which underlines again how much has changed in shed useage since 2002. Each entry also has a section called 'style notes' which allows Jane - who is a professional multi-disciplinary stylist - to talk through the look of each shed with her expert eye.

Jane writes nicely and there's no pretentious gobbledygook. It's a lively read and her hard work in tracking down some marvellous sheds (I particularly like French artist Richard Texier's studio at the end of a pier) has paid off in spades. But what really makes it stand out are the several hundred photographs by Tina Hillier. She has absolutely got to grips with each of the sheds, picking out intriguing details inside as well as atmospheric exterior shots - even if you're familiar with some of these sheds, there are so many new shots of them that you won't be disappointed.

You should certainly buy my cool shed (published by Pavilion in hardback at £14.99) - not only is Jane a decent person, this will definitely be the best book about sheds published this year.

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New shed books for 2012

2012 looks like it could be a bumper year for books about sheds. Here are two early contenders for shed book of the year. First in line is My Cool Shed: An Inspirational Guide to Stylish Hideaways by Jane Field-Lewis, published by Pavilion towards the end of June. Here's the blurb:

"Building on the success of My Cool Caravan and My Cool Campervan in 2010 and 2011, this follow-up book celebrates the humble and not so humble shed, from artists' studios to beach huts, and the diverse ways in which owners are styling them. My Cool Shed features 35 sheds, small cabins, garden rooms, beach huts, modern architectural mini masterpieces and other small spaces given purpose by their owners to pursue their hobbies, careers, creative endeavours or just to find some peace and solitude. The book includes high-quality stylish photography to show a wide range of well styled and elegant sheds, cabins, dens and hidewaways in attractive locations. The owners' stories and accompanying style notes offer insight as well as inspiration. This is not a 'how to' book, although a sourcebook will be included, but more of a 'feel good' book and provider of inspiration."

And then there's The Joy of Sheds: Because a Man's Place Isn't in the Home by Frank Hopkinson published by Portico in May. And here's the blurb: "The Joy of Sheds is a shed miscellany that chronicles man's need for a small space on his own. It's a humorous look at every aspect of the shed experience, mixed with shed facts and some practical information too. Many famous people have created in sheds. Inventor Trevor Baylis thought up the clockwork radio in a shed, George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalian in one and Dylan Thomas would compose poetry in his. The average UK male does not tend to devote his shed to poetry, though. Along with chapters on how to customize your shed into an exotic creation, "Pimp Your Shed", there are "Shed Facts": Almost a fifth of men have had an accident in a shed, it's the single most dangerous place in the home after the kitchen. Other chapters include "Shed Vision", on the typical items stored in sheds, and "The Genus Shed", which places the shed in the Linnaean order of buildings. "Shed Experience" pulls in shed stories from around the world, but particularly Australia, and there are also tales of the "Euro-Shed". There are chapters on "Sheds in Literature" (Lady Chatterly's Lover and Cold Comfort Farm), "Sheds at the Movies", and "Sheds in Music".

And of course, if you don't yet own a copy, Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution is also a decent read...
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