Introduction
SHEDWORKING
INTRODUCTION
on page 6 Henry Moore at work in
one of his studio sheds at his home in Perry Green.
below Rooms Outdoor’s Cuberno garden office, inspired by Le Corbusier.
Our offices define us: they dictate where we live, who we see, how we feel. We are where we work. And where we work is changing. We are coming home. For centuries, there was a strong connection between work life and home life since most work was carried out at home in the form of cottage industries. But since the industrial revolution – which gradually reduced workers’ independence and flexibility while at the same time also making their workplace more dangerous and unpleasant, a spectacularly unattractive work/ life balance – we have increasingly moved to a system where the majority of us commute miles every day to factorylike offices where we work with strangers and then escape from work to go back home and recover. And it really is an escape. ‘Building solutions: improving office environments’, a report from mental health charity Mind, suggests that workplace stress is the second biggest occupational health problem in the UK and that the office environment is a key factor. More than a quarter of the people interviewed in the study thought conditions in their office had affected their mental health and were unhappy with many aspects of their working environment, from the amount of natural light around them to the size of their working space. ‘Dilbert-type cubicles won’t cut it in the information economy,’ says Mind chief executive Paul Farmer. ‘To maximise productivity and creativity, it’s 8
crucial that staff have inspiring, flexible work environments. Everyone thinks of health and safety as a physical thing – we mustn’t forget health and safety for our minds.’ In an experiment for computer giant Hewlett-Packard, led by cognitive neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis, the impact of different working environments was tested on employees. Researchers built two environments, the first like a battery chicken farm with cramped, cluttered surfaces and bulky monitors, the second more ‘free-range’ which was designed to give people more space and also the option to work from home. When the poor folk forced to work within the first scenario changed to the second there were dramatic results. Productivity rose by 400 per cent. Stress levels fell by 50 per cent. Blood pressure was lower. Short-term memory improved. Conclusion: workspace matters. Now – thanks to spectacular advances in technology and a change in the very nature of work itself as it becomes increasingly knowledgebased – working from home is becoming possible again. The culture of ‘presenteeism’, whereby management demand employees must be at a central place of work to be considered working, is simply an outdated approach in the twentyfirst century. The Working outside the Box Report from the UK’s Equal Opportunities Commission suggests half of the working population want to work with more flexibility in order for them to have 9
SHEDWORKING
a life outside work. Around 29 million Americans are now working remotely at least one day per month. Japan plans to expand its homeworking population to more than 10 million by 2010. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ latest figures show that 2.35 million Australians (25 per cent of those in employment), work at least some hours from home. Indeed, it is the behaviour of individuals, not companies, that has led the changes in home working and teleworking: whereas it was the bosses embracing the white heat of technology during the Industrial Revolution, their equivalents in the late twentieth century became the Luddites, often refusing to acknowledge the way in which new technology can set the workforce free. This is not a movement that has been management10
INTRODUCTION
led although managers have often proved willing collaborators. The next steps will continue to be lifestyle-led as people explore the possibilities offered by high-speed broadband access and a willingness to become closer to their local community. The increasingly popular portfolio careerist will find shedworking particularly compatible with achieving a better quality of life, seeing their family more frequently and making their own decisions about the way they want to work. 75 per cent of young people expect to be able to work flexibly in companies they join and remote working is a deciding factor in what job they choose, claims research commissioned by BT. ‘For young people today the idea of being in the same office, at the same time, with the same people every day, is just completely out of date,’ said Beatriz Butsana-Sita from BT Business. Some managers have already got the message that centralized control in one space is not necessarily good business practice: ‘Tomorrow’s Leaders’, a study commissioned by City & Guilds and the Institute of Leadership and Management, revealed that 73 per cent of managers have flexible working in their organisation. ‘What we are seeing,’ says Phil Flaxton, chief executive of the not-forprofit initiative Work Wise UK that advocates smarter working practices, ‘is the beginnings of a complete revolution in the way we work.’ At insurance brokerage company NRG::Seattle, employees are encouraged to work at home one day every week so that they can concentrate better and recharge their spirits. The result is low employee turnover and employees who are full of energy at work. In 2007, HSBC chief executive Michael Geoghegan said he planned to halve the company’s 8,000-strong Canary Wharf workforce by encouraging more people to work from home, explaining: ‘I don’t think we’re a really progressive, perceptive company if 8,000 people have to get up every day at an unearthly hour to leave home and then go back again. Technology should change our thought process.’ Some are even more flexible than this: Propaganda Headquarters is a major
LEFT The view from US President
Thomas Jefferson’s garden office pavilion at Monticello, Virginia, where he read in peace during the evening.
brand consultancy for various board sports at Laguna Beach and allows any member of the team to go surfing for up to two hours during the work day if the waves are over 6 ft, as long as they make up the time later (and if there is fresh snow, a half day to go snowboarding can be agreed too). Other businesses are starting to see the advantages of getting back to nature. Office supplies specialist Kokuyo opened a ‘garden office’ on the rooftop of its headquarters in Tokyo in 2008 to reduce electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. 140 employees are expected to work in the open-air garden office – which has full electrics and WiFi network – for ninety days a year. The pleasant surroundings include newly planted trees, a pond (which will help with heat in the summer) and moveable eaves-like solar panels. The company believes it will also improve efficiency. Kokuyo President Akihiro Kuroda said: ‘Workers can work more efficiently in a natural environment. I hope it will lead to changes in employees’ mentality.’ Yet it’s not a revolution as foreseen in the Jetsons – which is particularly sad since George Jetson regarded his work routine of three hours a day, three times a week as rather gruelling – nor in the exhibitions or popular science magazine articles of the 1950s in which workers flew to their offices in fumeless car-planes. More recently, and rather more realistically, the Orange Future Enterprise coalition came up with four possible scenarios of how we’ll be working in 2016. One was essentially a status quo of commuting to centralized offices – romantically called ‘Disciples of the cloud’ – but the others all foresaw more radical changes with many more homeworkers enjoying portfolio careers (a career of multiple part-time jobs) and almost none commuting in this brave-ish new world. It is time to start recognising this second industrial revolution in where we work and for us to reconnect the severed link between living and working. More precisely, we need to start thinking about shedworking. ‘Shedworking’ is the term I came up with in 2005 when I started publishing The Shed magazine,
for the growing numbers of people working from home in garden offices, small shedlike buildings in unused space in their back gardens. Over the last decade we have seen an evolution of the office workplace. A small shed which once only housed lawnmowers and pots can now be insulated from the cold, fitted with its own electrics, and can link you to anywhere in the world: Andrew Bolger of the Financial Times describes how ‘a burgeoning breed of “techno-commuters” is using fast, newly affordable broadband connections to hold down city jobs without sacrificing rural isolation’, citing a former investment banker who runs an online business information service about the Russian aerospace industry from the Hebridean island of Tiree. Famous shedworkers who have attracted the most attention are artists and writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Roald Dahl, Henry Thoreau and Henry Moore. But nowadays you’re just as likely to find accountants at the bottom of the garden as you are sculptors: Peter Smith runs his successful media law practice from a Scandinavian-style wooden shed in his garden in Strathpeffer in the Highlands of Scotland while a recent Chelsea Flower Show show garden included a garden office specifically for a shedworking solicitor. And like homeworking in general, shedworking is becoming increasingly popular around the globe. ‘Once shabby, now showy, the shed has become a haven for the home office, art studio, sewing niche or guy getaway,’ says Jane Hulse in the Los Angeles Times. ‘It’s cheaper than adding on, goes up faster and looks nothing like a place to stash the lawn mower.’ Indeed, the prestigious annual Emerging Technology Conference (Etech) held in California in 2009 focused on the technology of abundance and constraints under the banner ‘Living, Reinvented’ and devoted a large part of its proceedings to what they call nomadism and shedworking. Here’s how they put it: As cities and their suburbs rapidly increase their footprint, there are some who reject the crowded living conditions, but take advantage of the 11
SHEDWORKING
connectedness. They adopt a high-tech lifestyle within the constraints of a smaller space or take their possessions and their bits with them on the road, to the farthest reaches of the globe.
Moreover, commuting to the end of your garden is an option as popular among women as men. As Virginia Woolf famously wrote in A Room of One’s Own, ‘a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself’. While nothing seems as unshakeable as a man’s interest in some kind of shedlike man-space, over the last few years women have been quietly redefining shed life, turning the new breed of garden buildings into places to work, to create and to think as well as to hang the secateurs. Indeed women are a key element in the expansion of homeworking. More than one in three ‘mumtrepreneurs’ are looking at starting their own business from home so they can combine childcare and work, according to a report by AXA, while a 12
INTRODUCTION
quarter say they would consider returning to their previous job if they could work remotely from a home office. Physically, it’s easier to prevent – or at least restrict – your children, spouses and pets invading your workspace if you’re based in a garden office (although admittedly I get more bees in here than I did when I worked in the dining room). Nor is there any need to double up on spaces. With a shed, your third bedroom remains modem free and your dining room table is not deluged by paper. And just as importantly, a shed keeps you away from the fridge so the temptation to nibble is more remote. Financially, it adds value to your property, up to 5 per cent according to some reports, and is certainly much cheaper than moving house to get an extra room in which to work. Sanctuary Garden Offices claim that buying a garden office is a better bargain than commuting with a rail ticket from Twickenham to Waterloo. It’s also a great place to meet clients. I’ve had several meetings in my garden office and every single visitor has been at the very least intrigued by the arrangements and most are positively impressed. Psychologically, shedworking marks a clear difference between where you live and where you work – there’s no taint of work attached to any part of your home. Instead all the taint is in the shed. And going somewhere to begin your working day is important, almost a kind of ceremony. Architecturally too things have moved on quite a bit since the first primitive huts. Garden office designers today proudly announce Le Corbusier (who himself designed his Cabanon, a rather nice little shedworking atmosphere in the south of France complete with studio, where he worked on the last projects of his life) as their inspiration and the top garden designers regularly use garden offices as key elements in major show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show. The Qube garden office was a finalist in the 2007 Grand Designs Awards: with a western red cedar external wood cladding, the Qube is built with structural insulated panels (SIPs) then plaster boarded and skimmed before
LEFT A bird’s eye view of shedworking in a Homelodge timber building.
LEFT Relaxing in a Qube garden office.
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SHEDWORKING
being painted. Options include an additional store, a roof deck with a staircase up from the office, and a kitchenette. The Qube design is attractive but the approach is not unique – the range of high quality, reasonably priced garden office buildings means the potential shedworker is spoiled for choice. At its most basic level, a shed is a shelter. A garden office is a machine for working in. It must stand up and must not let in rain. It is not necessarily beautiful – although some of the examples in this book are both spectacular and affordable – but it is well crafted and homely. You do not suffer from Sick Building Syndrome in a shed. The shed office or studio – alternatively known as a ‘shoffice’ or ‘shudio’ – is simply on a much more manageable scale than a thirty-two-floor tower block which gives you static electric shocks. Phyllis Richardson points out in her book XS: Big Ideas, Small Buildings that there are many reasons for our interest in micro-architecture. ‘Most obviously,’ she says, ‘the miniaturisation of architecture reduces it to a human scale with which we can interact more easily.’ Maybe that is why when BBC Scotland opened its new headquarters, the multimillion-pound offices also included two bright red sheds from B&Q. Ross Hunter from Graven Images, who were responsible for the interiors, says the sheds served various important purposes. ‘They’re effective landmarks, quiet places for thinking, and amidst all the glass, their walls accommodate drawing pins.’ Shedworking is a concept that’s increasingly popular worldwide. In Tokyo, Martin van der Linden decided to give the offices of his van der architects practice a new look using salvaged wood from a local house about to be demolished. ‘Our sheds are like little houses,’ he explains. ‘Miniature versions of archetypical houses built inside out within a house. I am an architect by training, but my company has been working mainly on interiors. For the design of our office, I wanted to see if a group of sheds built inside a space would create the idea of architecture within architecture, like a box within a box. A house is a symbol of security, of protection. Having sheds inside the office gives 14
INTRODUCTION
far left The red shed at BBC
Scotland’s new headquarters.
left above and below van der architect’s offices appear quite traditional from the outside . . . but inside, the shedworking ethos is immediately apparent.
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SHEDWORKING
right Bosch & Fjord’s ‘plug and
play’ office in a box.
far right Towerworking: Jayne
Tarasun’s modern folly is a perfect place to work.
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INTRODUCTION
the staff the feeling of having an extra layer to retreat into when their task requires concentration. Our office is completely free-address, there are no assigned seats, so you sit and work wherever you feel like working.’ Or take Bosch & Fjord’s vision for Innovation Lab’s workspace at Copenhagen’s IT University, what they call a ‘plug and play’ answer to furniture design: large shipping crates contain a variety of office modules including a kitchen and three different types of workstation. Crates can be combined to form bigger spaces and each one is delivered by truck, unloaded, installed and can be packed away again easily if and when necessary. Packing and unpacking takes only two hours. ‘The furniture system considers the diversity and individuality of the employees,’ say Bosch & Fjord. ‘It is a consequence of the modern corporate need for flexibility and innovation.’ The writer and artist John Ruskin argued that our buildings must mean something to their inhabitants, that their spiritual concerns are as important as the material ones. For Ruskin, buildings were not just bricks and mortar, they were structures embedded with emotion. Designer Jayne Tarasun, who runs Folly-Smith in Cornwall, feels very much the same. She specialises in bespoke modern follies and her prototype model is a shed tower, 10 ft tall and 5 ft square with a mezzanine level, ladder included. Jayne describes her work as reviving a unique and celebrated slice of traditional British eccentricity but fusing it with contemporary design principals and traditional, sustainable materials. She uses cedar shingles, a chestnut frame and copper for the roof. ‘A solitary haven, they are a place of sanctuary from the pressures of modern life. The fundamental human need to retain a true sense of self, to sit in solitude, escape distractions, and to sit in quiet emptiness and re-engage with creativity is vital to our mental and physical and emotional well-being, as individuals and as a society. I believe that everybody needs a space of their own and the psychological need for space is fundamental to all human existence. I have a personal fascination with the shed, as it represents to me a personal 17
SHEDWORKING
place of refuge as a child. As an adult, I still crave a special space and time to be alone.’ Certainly, shedworking is as much a statement of intent as it is a piece of architecture. Antonia Swinson, chief executive of the Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition, agrees. ‘Boy, what a difference a shed makes for sheer freedom and creativity,’ she wrote in The Scotsman. ‘I made connections I would miss in a busy office, new avenues of investigation . . . Perhaps it is time to start evaluating the shed’s true bottom-line value? Management consultants could have a profitable business persuading today’s knowledge businesses to stop building glass palaces that cost a fortune to heat and start investing in employee huts – complete with company logo.’ A garden office is certainly an inspiring place in which to work and studies show that homeworkers are more productive than those in ‘traditional’ offices: findings from BT report a 20 per cent increase in productivity when smarter working practices are introduced, despite what London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, says about working from home as ‘simply a euphemism for sloth, apathy, staring out of the window and random surfing of the internet.’ And finally, and to be honest this is the clincher for many of us, shedworking is simply more fun, adding a certain pizzazz to your working life, giving you a different angle on work and life. Take the shed workplace of textile designer Rosa Skific in the old San Telmo barrio of central Buenos Aires. Fitting snugly in a restricted space, it is a refurbished metal container, built by FPS Architects as a shedlike addition to her home. ‘This steel volume is very different from the rest of the neighbourhood,’ says architect Franciso Fenili from FPS. ‘The red colour shows the creative inspiration of the owner and is a contrast between the old and the new architecture. Inside, the atelier takes in the immensity of the city through large floor-to-ceiling glazing, giving the impression of a refuge for the artist’s creative inspiration.’ Talking to shedworkers around the country about their garden offices, the one phrase that cropped up 18
INTRODUCTION
below Rosa Skific’s architectdesigned steel container office in the heart of Buenos Aires.
constantly was ‘I love it’. How many people can say the same about their office environment? Moreover, you feel much more a part of your local community if you have lunch in it, shop in it, wander through it to get your newspaper, and nip off for a swim in the afternoon in it. The RAC Foundation has asked the pertinent question ‘are long commutes eroding our social networks?’ To which, of course, the answer is ‘yes’. It is a sobering thought that, according to the magazine Company Car Driver (and they should know), the average company car driver spends eleven days a year stuck in congestion. Rush hour train commuters will acknowledge how miserable the first and last hours of their working day can be. The beauty of a garden office is that it combines a popular yearning for a pastoral ideal with the practicalities of technological development and
guards our privacy in the way that an open-plan office – even if you call it something exciting like a ‘den’ or a ‘hive’ – never can. As I write this from my garden office in Hertfordshire, I can watch blue tits whizzing in and out of the bird box next to my window, check on the development of my onions, and then start up a videoconference on my laptop with a business contact in upstate New York. It’s a pleasant balance, neither a remote smallholding nor a twenty-storey office block. I can pretend I’m in the countryside and still make money. A shed is ‘me space’: decorate it how you like, listen to your music as loud as you like, wear whatever you like. You’ll feel happier, work better, and get home quicker. Welcome to shedworking.
right Shed sweet shed: the garden office where this book was written.
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