Home Workspaces Evolving To Fit Times

The 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 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 seven 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.

There are also several distinct needs and desires being expressed by their clients. As more Americans come to see home offices as central to their lives, those offices say more about them as individuals, cut each also speaks to what decorators, architects and furniture manufacturers describe as a major aspect of the growing market for home offices, and of the ways millions of Americans are living and working at home.

Photo by Peter DaSilva.

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