At Work, At Home: Design Ideas for Your Home Workplace

by Neal Zimmerman

More than 50 million Americans work at home ... and the work they do is as varied as the houses they live in. This fresh take on home workspaces looks at a wide range of designs that suit some unique employment needs -- from a daycare center to a dance studio.

Genres: Architecture

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2001

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful book for ideas about setting up a home office or other workplace. If you're thinking of working at home - telecommuting, self-employment, or in some other way - this is a handy addition to your library.

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Powers’s Living with Books and Ellis’s At Home with Books, this is the sort of lushly illustrated volume anyone with similar interests will sit and drool over. If you work at home, or if you need a second space at home for the overspill from your office job, you have a number of options: Claim a corner of an existing space in your house or apartment (living room, kitchen, even a niche off a hallway), convert a spare bedroom or even a walk-in closet, move into the attic or the basement (if you live in the part of the country that has attics and basements), make a separate dedicated space out of a garage or other outbuilding, or even construct a new space on your property, either attached to your house or semi-isolated in a handy patch of woods. (My own home office, like many others, used to be a kid’s bedroom, and I haven’t done much to it; it still has the Winnie-the-Pooh ceiling fixture.) The author walks you through all these possibilities and has you think about zoning and property-line setbacks, and floor and ceiling materials, and light sources and plumbing, and active storage and bookshelving. He also points out the need to control your workspace, to separate work from home life, and to identify “swing spaces.” How much space do you really need? Maybe not as much as you think. Consider as a guide the acronym “CAMP,” which stands for Computer station, Administrative station, Meeting station, and Project station. The need may be minimal (I never have clients in my home) and some of the others may be combined (I do admin work at the same work table where I do projects), but looking at it this way will lead you to reconsider your own SoHo. The pictures in this book, naturally, will make you jealous of those with the design talent and the money to establish such luscious work areas. The nicest and most unusual, not surprisingly, belong to architects working at home. Nevertheless, even with my own relatively simple needs, I picked up a number of ideas on how to optimize my own space.

[February Four · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good ideas, definitely. This may be more suited to people who actually do _work_ at home, as opposed to folks who just need to deal with the bills once a month.