My Room in The Garden at London Design Festival

An interesting garden office design is on display at this year's London Design Festival, running until September 20, the My Room in the Garden office from Boano Prišmontas. It's a modular prefab built out of FSC-certified birch plywood which they claim can be erected in a single day and has been specifically designed as a result of the ongoing coronavirus working from home issues. The marketing is targeting both individual shedworkers and companies with employees looking for home office solutions. The basic structure is 1.8 x 2.4m (starting at £5,000) and you can make it larger by simply adding more modules. Cladding is an unusual corrugated clear polycarbonate which is obviously excellent for letting light in. Lots more images and information at their dedicated website here.

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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

 

 

Garden office with a bar

Pub sheds are one of the hottest types of shedlike constructions at the moment, witnessed by their huge popularity in the Shed of the Year competition. Here's a way of combining a garden office aesthetic (plus attractive porched area) with the delights of a relaxed space, The Arctic Bar from Arctic Cabins which has just over 13 square meters of space and can seat nine people, with built-in bar.

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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.

 

Home office adds £17,500 to the value of your home

 

A home office in a dedicated room adds £17,500 to the value of a property, according to research from Direct Line Home Insurance which looked at property listings throughout the UK and found the average price of a home with an office is four per cent higher than equivalent properties in the area (£439,000). It also polled 100 estate agents, of which nearly three quarters said that a dedicated home office adds considerably to the desirability of a property (what do the other 25% think?). Nearly a third of those properties with a home office were external studios

Around 38% of those polled said they were planning to convert existing space in their homes into an office over the next year. The study indicates that 19% have already converted a garage or shed into an office or have installed a garden office during lockdown, and another 10% are planning to do so at some point in the next 12 months. However, the estate agents cautioned owners not to convert bedrooms into home office space, saying it can negatively impact the listing price for a property.

Dan Simson, Head of Direct Line Home Insurance, said: “As their home office is likely to become a permanent fixture in their lives, it’s understandable many people are now starting to think about the changes and improvements they could make to their property to make home working more comfortable. As our research shows, not only does a dedicated office help a separation between work and home, it can also add significant value to a property. Anyone considering building work just needs to remember to inform their insurer before the work is carried out and update them on any additional rooms created so they have the correct level of cover.”

Image courtesy Smart 

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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.

 

 

Small garden office build (video)

An excellent lockdown build of a small garden office by Midlands-based health and safety trainer David Cartlidge. Here's what he says about it:

I deliver training and thanks to COVID-19, some customers wanted their training delivered over Microsoft Teams. With two kids and no home office, I needed a suitable space to do it from, but had nowhere. So I built myself a home office! Took around four weeks and cost less than £1,500.

 

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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

Catskill Mountains teahouse garden office

Author and magazine editor Rebecca Rego Barry is also a shedworker. Here, she describes her path to a shedworking life.

"This shed or outbuilding or ’teahouse,’ as we call it, was built in 2005, the year my husband and I relocated to the Catskill Mountains of New York," says Rebecca. "We moved in ’next door’ to my inlaws on a rural, dead end road, and presciently, my mother-in-law decided to build this one-room getaway in the acre or two of land between us. She and my father-in-law constructed it entirely on their own, getting help only when it came to shingling the roof. 

"When my children were younger, my mother-in-law hosted a book club for them in the teahouse during summer, and sometimes we would meet there for lunch or tea. For the past 18 months, however, I’ve been using it most weekday mornings to work on a novel-in-progress. I’ve worked from home as a freelance writer/editor for a dozen years, and getting away from my usual desk for a couple of hours has created a much-needed separation of state. It is quiet and woodsy, and the wifi is spotty, which helps. Even in winter last year—unless the snow drifts barred the door—I largely kept to my schedule by bundling up and keeping a miniature space heater at my feet."

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Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

 

Sturdy garden office

One of the insults hurled at garden offices from time to time is that they are merely "posh sheds". Not that there's anything wrong with a posh shed, but frankly any decent garden office is a really good build. But here's an example of a sturdy garden office build by Shires Oak Buildings in Southam, Warwickshire, that should persuade even the most cussed of antagonists. Some interesting photos of it being put together at the link too.

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“The ultimate work-from-home house”

Billed rather dramatically by Lee Koffman of Sotheby’s International Realty as "the ultimate work-from-home house" this property for sale in London (admittedly at just over £1.5 million) does indeed have a intriguing dual garden office set-up - a 16ft wide yurt with wooden floor and front door, and a 'traditional' garden office which is being used at the moment as an acupuncture room (apparently there is also permission for a larger garden office should you want on). At half the price is a one-bedroomed flat in London on with Winkworth which comes with the garden office below.

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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.