The rise of the office at the bottom of the garden
A new breed of highend bespoke builds – fitted with all mod cons – is taking homeworking to the next level, says Rosa Silverman
As half-term comes to a close, it’s not just children who dread the return of packed lunches and long days wedged behind a desk. Yet for parents who are less than thrilled with the prospect of going back to work, there is a means of sweetening the pill – by bringing business to the bottom of the garden in the form of a “shoffice”.
Sheds are no longer just storage huts for garden furniture and compost bags, nor even makeshift workspaces done up with desks and lamps pilfered from other rooms in the house – high-end modern shoffices (a painful portmanteau for shed offices) come decked out with underfloor heating, bi-fold doors, wall lights and – importantly – wifi.
Garden Hideouts, which offers a range of state-of-the-art “garden rooms”, reports a growth in sales of between 30 and 40 per cent over the past two to three years, while the Posh Shed Company, which does what it says on the tin, has seen a 14 per cent increase in sales since last year. No wonder, perhaps, given that a 2016 Labour Force Survey by the Office for National Statistics suggested the number of people working from home had increased by a fifth to 1.5million – not all of these people will have a ready-made space in the house for this, which is where the creative reimagining of the garden shed comes in.
Chris Hill, founder of Garden Hideouts, says: “The buildings we put up are as good as houses, thermally and insulatively speaking. It’s like lifting a sitting room or office out of your house and putting it in the garden.”
If you want to opt for a ready designed affair, the new Hub corner studio from John Lewis features floor-to-ceiling glass panels on two of its walls, match board lining and double glazing, and starts from £12,499; meanwhile, the Snug, by Plank bridge, which offers options including single or double doors, wood burners and radiators, starts from £18,500. A functional garden shed can be bought from B&Q for less than £200 while, though we’re hardly comparing like with like, prices at Garden Hideouts, by contrast, start at £9,950 for a basic self-assembly kit, increasing to about £68,000 for the top-of-therange models. The average value, says Hill, is between £30,000 and £35,000.
This may seem steep, but “certain customers want to create a place to work in without sacrificing a room in the house,” explains Richard Frost, managing director of the Posh Shed Company. Viewing the shoffice as an extension, in the same vein as a conservatory or loft conversion, then, which can add value to your home and, crucially, avoids the need for planning permission, is increasingly being seen as an attractive option.
The elevated costs of moving mean we’re more likely than ever to try to maximise the space we have. “Stamp duty has gone up and people aren’t moving house as much, so the home improvement market is doing well,” says Hill. “People are saying, ‘well, rather than moving, let’s live and make do. We’re quite happy where we are.’ Four or five years ago it was unusual [to turn your shed into an office], whereas now it’s very usual. There’s a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ factor as well.”
Anyone who’s worked from home knows the temptation of staying in their pyjamas all day; it doesn’t help one feel like a professional. But the shed-cum-office makes the homeworker more likely to feel they have left the house, Hill points out, and shed-workers reportedly contribute just short of £30billion annually to the economy, a survey by Cuprinol shows.
“If you work in your spare bedroom, you haven’t left the house, but if you go down the garden you have left it, so psychologically it feels different,” explains Hill.
The widespread popularity of the shed as we know it dates back to the Twenties and Thirties, when a housing boom brought with it a blossoming of gardens and the new-found desire for some outdoor storage space. Immortalised in our culture everywhere from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Monty Python, the hut at the end of the garden holds a unique place in the British imagination, and there is a noble tradition of the use of sheds as work spaces, too. At the turn of the 20th century, George Bernard Shaw wrote many of his plays in his garden shed in Hertfordshire, while half a century later, Dylan Thomas penned poetry in a shed in Carmarthenshire, Wales. Virginia Woolf, having realised the need for “a room of one’s own”, wrote her novels in a revamped potting shed at her Sussex home. And inventor Trevor Baylis developed the clockwork radio in his garden shed in the Nineties.
Hill estimates the interest in sheds is no longer just middle-aged chaps in search of man caves: about 40 per cent of inquiries come from women, he says. Frost agrees: “The ‘she-shed’ trend has definitely been a catalyst in converting the shed from a means of storage to a living space, with customers wanting a stylish yet practical solution.”
Gordon Thorburn, who has been described as Britain’s leading authority on sheds, has noticed this demographic shift since his book Men and Sheds was published in 2002 (the title itself is a giveaway). “At that time there were no women involved. That’s changed completely. There are women in my second book [about sheds – co-authored with Gareth Jones and published in 2006] but none in the first. It used to be the case that sheds were associated with older men, but no longer.”
Yet there remains, he believes, “a lot of mystique” surrounding sheds. Thorburn, fittingly, stationed his office in his shed at his last house – “just to get out of the way”. Of what? “Her indoors,” he jokes. “And also to get some peace. If there are people coming round and knocking on the door and you’re trying to work in the house, it just doesn’t work. Using the shed is a cheap way of getting isolation.” This, at least, has always been true: the word itself comes from the old Anglo-saxon scead, meaning shade, but specifically a place of quiet and seriousness.
Thorburn says: “An Englishman’s home is his castle and there’s certainly something of that in our love of sheds.”
This may be so. But perhaps it’s also the case that in our modern, work-obsessed, long-hours culture, an Englishman or woman’s home is their office. And if that sounds a little cheerless – well, at least there’s no commute.