The New Mindful Home: garden office wellbeing

 

As we emerge into spring and out of lockdown, this could be a good time for you to assess how you decorate your (new?) garden office. The New Mindful Home by stylist and writer Joanna Thornhill is, as the title suggests, aimed at improving your emotional wellbeing by creating a home that calms and supports you. However, it's also a useful (and not too massive) guide to creating all kinds of supportive room layouts, with plenty of excellent colour illustrations and a useful resources section to track down the things you like the look of.

So there are useful chapters on 'Creating a sanctuary' which looks at how to use colour and adapt your room depending on your personality type, 'Mindful objects', and generally organising your space. Throughout, there's a welcome emphasis on responsible consumerism and planet-friendly materials - indeed there's an entire chapter on 'Becoming biophilic' which will be of particular interest to garden-based shedworkers. If you're wondering how to make your garden office both a nicer spot and more conducive to work in, this is a great starting point.

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Monday posts are sponsored by eDEN Garden Rooms. Stunning, bespoke high quality garden rooms, to suit your unique space and style

The rise of the 'she shed'

An excellent piece in today's Observer on women and sheds in which Nell Gard talks to several sheddies about their builds and how "women are discovering what a life-saver their own private sheds can be". Here's a snippet from writer Charlotte Philby about her garden office:

 “One of the top things on my wishlist was a writing shed. So when I saw this one, I was sold. There are writer’s sheds, and there are outdoor offices posing as writer’s sheds – this is very much the former. It’s replete with a remarkably high population of arachnids. The unintentional aesthetic is very much Beatrix Potter writing shed meets Camden Market stall circa 1994. The beauty of the space is the simplicity of it and being immersed in the garden."

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Robert Burns: shedworker

 

This is the rural folly inspired by anchorites cells turned stone summerhouse known as The Hermitage in Friars Carse, near Dumfries in Scotland. It was built by a Captain Robert Riddell who was a friend of the writer Robert Burns and who lent it to him as a garden office writing shed in which to write poetry. Among works Burns composed here was the eponymous 'Written In Friars Carse Hermitage' which begins:

Thou whom chance may hither lead,

Be thou clad in russet weed,

Be thou deckt in silken stole,

Grave these maxims on they soul.

Burns also used his 'diamond' pen to write on the window pane and liked the spot so much he occasionally overnighted here. After Burns fell out with Riddell (probably over something he said about Riddell's wife during one of their drinking sessions in the hermitage), the building fell into disrepair. Below is what it looked like in 1882, half a dozen years after some restoration work. It was further restored in 2009, although there is some debate about how original the building is and its first location.

  

And in the video below you can see inside the hermitage.

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Camden garden studio

An unusual but engaging looking garden office by Eckford Chong for a back garden in London, with the top section made of larch standing on top of a tiled plinth. Here's what the designers say about it: 

"Below the windows is a simple tiled plinth, which borrows from mid century utilitarian and Modernist architecture. The elegant steel doors and window frames fit and sit back within the reveal of the mass. The tiles themselves are set on a grid that aligns with the Larch above, grout lines and expansion joints meeting shadow gaps in the true Modernist ambition that celebrates the elegance which can be achieved through modern methods of manufacture."

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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.

Mirrored garden office

There are various ways of making your garden office blend into your garden landscape, and here's an option to consider, using mirrors (previous examples covered on Shedworking are here and also here). This one above comes courtesy of Oxfordshire-based William Green Architects who put it together as part of a larger design on a Grade II listed property in a Northamptonshire village. Here's what they say about it:

"This mirrored garden office designed by our team becomes almost invisible within its surroundings. A garden office can be eco-friendly, ergonomically designed to either be a modern statement or hidden within the grounds and can provide all the space you require."

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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.

'Al desko' working in the garden set to boom this year

Nearly half of people working from home are planning to go (horrible PR terminology klaxon) ‘Al Desko’ this year, taking their laptop into their garden once the sun gets going, according to a new survey by Lenovo.

Around 43% of the 1,000 UK adults questioned plan to work from their garden, with two thirds of these believing that being outdoors in the fresh air will make them more productive. Four out of 10 people said they are just bored with their normal inside work space and six out of 10 that they have felt trapped indoors during the winter.

Half plan to improve their garden, including adding better seating (45 per cent), making it more private (37 per cent) and building a covered space (33 per cent).

Repeating the results of many other similar surveys, 50 per cent of employees believe having flexibility where they work has a positive impact on their productivity.

Lenovo spokesman Philip Oldham said: “This past year has seen an enormous amount of change, particularly in the way that we work and how certain environments have actually helped boost our productivity. It’s been interesting to see how the UK lockdowns have increased the desire to get outdoors, and just how many people have made this a key part of their working practice. To us, it makes perfect sense to blend the enjoyment of being outdoors with being able to work efficiently."

Image courtesy Plankbridge 

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Brexit means UK sheds can finally have curved walls again

Today marks the end of a long campaign against the bizarre EU ruling made back in September 1994 (officially 'Commission Regulation (EC) No. 2257/94') that required that sheds in general, including garden offices, as a minimum standard must not have "abnormal curvature".

This had a catastrophic effect on the UK shed market, particularly for producers of shepherds' huts and retro Anderson shelters. The binding law made by unelected Eurocrats in Luxembourg imposed a €100,000 fine on any company which made, sold, or indeed simply sketched in pencil plans for a shed which had walls deviating from nice tight right angles by even one degree. 

Although we officially left most of the constraints of EU law on December 1 last year, one or two pieces of outstanding legislation have remained in place and have required additional discussions. This regulation is one of those and shed producers are now, as the Daily Express puts it, "breathing a sigh of relief" that they are finally allowed to build proper British sheds which look like Le Corbusier's finest work.

As an indication of what the UK Shed Marketing Board has been up against, EU timber spokesoman Loof Lirpa denied that the law even existed, which is typical of them.

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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.