‘The separation from the house is a game-changer and a focus-changer as well’
New mum Christina Daly is the HR Director for LinkedIn and lives with her husband in Dublin 7. Stuck for space at the start of the pandemic, they invested in a readyto-go outdoor pod.
‘We live in a small house in Dublin city centre and while we love the location, the lack of space was a big challenge when I started working from home.
I had my son, Jack, just as the country went into lockdown so what used to be my office is now Jack’s bedroom.
We really needed to create a space for me to work in but we didn’t have the time or space to go for a garden room. We needed a readyto-go solution so when a colleague of mine posted an article about the WFH Pocket by BORIEN, I knew we had found the answer to our problems.
We have a back lane entrance so the WFH Pocket was just dropped over our back wall. It comes with its own overhead heater and electrical supply so we just had to get an electrician to wire it up to the house.
I added an ergonomic chair and a large monitor for convenience. And I got the desk modified into a sit-stand. The basic WFH Pocket model costs €4,500 plus VAT and delivery but we paid a little bit more for modifications.
People often ask me if it’s claustrophobic. It isn’t at all. There’s a small window at the desk and it’s positioned so that it faces into the kitchen and means I can see my husband, my mum and the baby while I work.
There’s a kind of a connectivity and flow to it, yet the separation from the house is a game-changer, and a focus-changer as well because I’m not distracted by anything.
The Pocket has actually become a really functional extra space in pandemic life. My husband uses it for Zoom calls with the lads so it becomes a bit of a beer hut on a Tuesday and Friday night! Then I sometimes use it for catching up with the girls on a Saturday night.
We poll everyone in our company quite regularly and what we’re seeing from the results is that a lot of people are struggling with working from home because the space they have to work in isn’t conducive to working. We’re beginning to understand that a separate space, that isn’t a bedroom, is really important from a mental wellness point of view.”