Marketing garden offices - a visual case study

Ad campaigns for garden offices are few and far between and usually rely on the simple attractiveness of the product, but Ecospace's series of ads designed by creative marketing agency Amp really stands out. I particularly like the branded rickshaws which were used to transport people around the Chelsea Flower Show earlier this year - the drivers naturally encouraged their passengers to visit the stand.Most importantly, not only did Ecospace get some good media coverage and attract more visitors to the web site, Amp say that a direct result of the campaign was an increased number of garden offices sold.

When log cabins go bad...

This is what can happen when you get too carried away with your shedworking atmosphere, as shown in an article by Lisa Montgomery in Electronic House. It's a 10,000-square-foot log 'cabin' home with 12 thermostats, 20 motorised window shades, and a 90-foot waterfall... I'm guessing it won't be appearing on Treehugger any time soon.

Hotel Everland

Hotel Everland would be a wonderful place for some shedworking. The design comes from Swiss installationists L/B (Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann). Essentially it's a one-room hotel/shedworking atmosphere which includes a bathroom, a double bed and a sitting room. You can only book it for one night only and it will be on the roof of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris following an exhausting world tour until the end of 2008. The site is well worth a browse, full of videos, information and a nice webcam. A book on the project is out soon.
Via the increasingly trendy Uncle Wilco at shedblog

Cabmen's shelters

Not so much for shedworking as for taxi drivers looking for some shedrelaxing, you can find more than a dozen of these historic shelters which date back to 1875 around London. This is how the Urban75 site explains their history:

"Because cab drivers weren't allowed to leave their vehicles when parked at a stand, it was difficult for them to get a hot meal while at work, so The Earl of Shaftesbury (God bless 'im) and a few philanthropic chums decided to create a cabbie's charity in 1874. Entitled the Cabmen's Shelter Fund, the charity set out to construct and run shelters to provide cabbies with 'good and wholesome refreshments at moderate price Between 1875 and 1914, a total of 61 shelters were built at cost of around £200 eac Because the shelters stood on a public highway, the police stipulated that they weren't allowed to be any larger than a horse and cart."

According to the site surviving shelters, now Grade II listed, can be seen at:
Chelsea Embankment - near the Albert Bridge
Embankment Place
Grosvenor Gardens - west side of north garden
Hanover Square - north of central garden
Kensington Park Road - outside numbers 8-10
Kensington Road - north side
Pont Street
Russell Square - west corner (previously in Leicester Square)
St George's Square, Pimlico
Temple Place (above)
Thurloe Place, Kensington - opp the Victoria & Albert Museum
Warwick Avenue - Clifton Gardens
Wellington Place, St John's Wood

Box of Delights - van der Architects, Tokyo

Now this is what I call a shedworking atmosphere, as featured on Uncle Wilco's shedblog and readersheds. These are the offices of van der Architects in Tokyo and this is how owner Martin van der Linden describes them:

"For our new office we took a house in a residential area in the centre of Tokyo. We wanted to make sure that we would not end up with a feeling of being in "an office". We wanted to create a work environment that expresses what we do, we are architects, we creative, unusual and imaginative. We sent Nanako, one of our designers house hunting. As most houses in Japan only have a 20-30 year life space we wanted to see if we could salvage an old house and re-use the wood for our sheds. Nanako found a 40 year old house that was about to be torn down. We then asked the demolition company to give us the wood and interior door frames to re-use."

Martin also writes a blog Work Vitamins.

Jabba the Hut video

Regular readers will know that Shedworking has been closely following the Bathing Beauties project of splendid new beach hut designs on the Lincolnshire coast this year. Above is a time lapse video of the Jabba the Hut design being built and there is a longer slideshow here.
Four of the designs are now permanently installed (Come Up And See Me by Michael Trainor, a two-storey hut based on a giant gin and tonic; Eyes Wide sHut by Feix and Merlin, a glamorous 'picture frame' hut; Jabba by i-am associates, the world's first contemporary cave; and Halcyon Hut by Atelier NU which pays homage to the traditional beach hut form) and you can now try and book them for around £25 daily. Contact Bob Suich at East Lindsey District Council on 01507 601111 for further information.

One Show - shed gallery

The next segment of the One Show's mini series on sheds and garden offices will be shown on BBC1 tomorrow at 7pm. In the meantime, they've been building up a nice collection of sheds sent in by viewers on their web site here. Here are a selection of my favourites. First in the Netherlands, More than a shed (pictured above) from Alan Leebance who says: "This structure is so much more than just a shed. At the rear there are sleeping quarters - this is a lifestyle essential for the modern put-upon man." Below is the Zen shed from Clare Lee who writes: "This is our shed or "The Japanese Pavillion" as we like to call it. The shoji screen doors slide back to reveal a multitde of things normally found inside a garden shed - lawn mower, garden tools, DIY tools, paint pots, pesticides, picnic hampers and much more." And finally, Hand built by Peter Vivian. "This is a picture of my shed/workshop that I designed and built myself around seven years ago," he says. "I use it for my hobby which is anything involving wood, furniture making, turning but mostly making traditional rocking horses."