Havenwood

Havenwood is a family run summerhouses, studios and storage sheds business started in 1995 by Danish-born design Kim Parker, a former product designer for Conran. Each design is entirely bespoke and is inspired by Scandinavian and North American architecture. They have a rather elegant website too.


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Washington Post highlights the delights of garden offices

An excellent article in the Washington Post by Adam Higgins (Outer Sanctum: Why we love to step outside the box to think inside the shed) takes a long look at the growth in shedworking and talks to Uncle Wilco from Shedblog about the delights of the shed. Here's an excerpt:

"In Northwest Washington, the novelist and journalist Christopher Buckley works in a writing shed converted from a one-car garage that is just big enough, he figures, to accommodate a Model T Ford. His father, William F. Buckley Jr., "was fond of a Spanish word, querencia," he said. "It's a bullfighting term, the part of the ring where the bull feels safe. It also denotes a loved space. So, it's my querencia."

"Perched in a corner of his garden, at the end of a lane, the shed was rundown when Buckley came to it in the early 1990s. He renovated it after giving up his home office to his growing family. He had the floor tiled, basic heating and air conditioning installed, and a porthole window added. Nowadays, he could return to the house, but the shed offers that vital psychological separation. It is quiet and breezy. Jake, the Labrador, lies across the threshold while the writer teases words from the keyboard. A desk fountain adds soothing white noise."

There's also a nice gallery of photos to enjoy.


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Is working from home greener than commuting?

There's an interesting follow-up by Lloyd Alter on Treehugger to the BBC Radio 4 programme earlier this week featuring myself talking to Alice Roberts (pictured): he makes some very good points about the study which suggested shedworking and working from home was not as green as people supposed. You can read it here. Well worth a browse.

Lidget Concrete Garages

Lidget Concrete Garages are probably, and unsurprisingly, best known for their concrete garages but if you're after a garden office or workshop shed which is not made of timber or metal, then they have some options which are well worth considering. The range, which uses uPVC, includes pent and apex roofs, various window and door combinations, as well as brick and stone effect finishes: pictured above is the Windsor garden building with optional georgian steel personnel door and uPVC opening window. And as they say: "A simple wipe clean is all that is required to keep your building looking as new."


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Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin: shedworkers

Bagpuss. The Clangers. Noggin the Nog. Any list of the 20th century's most successful shedworkers would have to include the combined talents of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin who produced some of the finest children's characters ever to feature on the small screen. And produced it in a shed (Firmin's disused cow shed to be more exact, pictured above). The shed was featured in a television programme last year (and indeed in a Chanell 4 documentary in 1997) and you can see it in various screenshots featured on Meg Pickard's excellent meish dot org blog. Below, the two geniuses work on Ivor the Engine inside the shed.

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Friday posts are sponsored by Extraspace, the flat-packed, man-portable expandable garden building experts. Click here for more details

New in.it.studio office design

The folk at in.it.studios have a new 'Garden Office' studio model primarily aimed at shedworkers (and they're offering £2,000 off it which will end this month). It's specifically aimed at those in an urban environment and comes fully insulated, heated and serviced. Well worth a browse, especially as they have revamped their website since our screencast profile and it's much more of a pleasure to navigate.


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Shedworking stars on BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth

I spent an afternoon with the BBC's Alice Roberts (who will be familiar to fans of Coast and Digging for Britain) and producer Helen Lennard in the summer to help them put together a programme on the ecofriendliness of working from home in general and shedworking in particular. Called Working from Home, it's part of the BBC's Costing the Earth series. You can listen to it again here on the BBC. It's an interesting show and while it emphasises green aspects of working from home, it doesn't shy away from some of the less environmentally-friendly elements too.


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Thursday posts are sponsored by Atelier garden studios which are sustainable, stylish, flexible, functional and future proofed