The Office, Housebroken

New York Times:

It was not so long ago, Neal Zimmerman recalls, that the term home office meant something very different from what it does today. In the early ’90s, when Zimmerman, a prominent workplace architect with offices in West Hartford, Conn., started designing residential work spaces, most people thought “home office” meant the headquarters of a company.

Back then, the very idea of working at home had a certain stigma, except in a few vocations like freelance writing. In the popular imagination, he said, “people who worked from home were usually laid off or couldn’t hold down a job, or were peripheral to the work force.”

But by 2006, according to data collected by the Dieringer Research Group, a marketing research company in Brookfield, Wis., more than 28 million Americans were working from home at least part time — an increase of 10 percent from just the year before, and 40 percent from 2002.

The American Home Furnishings Alliance reports that 7 in 10 Americans now have offices or designated workstations in their homes, a 112 percent increase since 2000.

And a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders found that home offices ranked as the fourth most important feature in a new upscale home, just ahead of security.

Read more.

Photo by Peter DaSilva.

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