1963: A spare, modern home office with walnut walls and an ebony-trimmed rosewood desk on a cast aluminum swivel.
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As a kid growing up in Hawai‘i, Megan Lehn would buzz her parents on their intercom system when she got home from school every day, to say hi and to tell them what she was eating for a snack. They’d reply from the third floor, where they shared an office. Working from home afforded Lehn’s parents the flexibility to take her to school and soccer practice, but they instituted clear boundaries when they were on the clock. As Lehn explains it: “Just because I’m home doesn’t mean you can bring up your Oreos and ask me a bunch of questions about Oreos.”
When Lehn bought a house in California a few years ago and started working for a company with an entirely remote staff, she found herself adopting her parents’ attitude toward separating work and life. One room became her work space, which she set up to look like “any other office”: dual screens, filing cabinets, wireless mouse, ergonomic everything. (She did take the liberty of painting one wall purple, filling the space with plants, and putting up photos from her travels to look at when she gets stressed.) Lehn’s husband knows not to disturb her when her door is closed, and when she’s done with work for the day, she leaves the room and doesn’t re-enter it until morning. “I really separate my personal stuff and my work stuff,” Lehn says.
Home offices take many forms, but what they almost universally offer is a threshold, a dividing line that tells the brain when it’s time to focus—and, just as importantly, when it’s time to stop working. While walls and a door create a powerful border, physically and mentally, they’re not necessary to this endeavor. Nonya Grenader, an architect and professor at Rice Architecture, once designed a narrow, elongated work space at the top of a staircase in a client’s house. Someone seated at the desk would have their back to the stairs, and a bookshelf extending several feet to their left provided a degree of separation from anyone going up or down the stairs. “It was a slice of space, but it was enough,” Grenader says. A demarcation as small as a desk reserved for work can help a person get in the zone.
The history of the home office is, of course, a history of working from home. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, vast swaths of Americans are reckoning with what may be a very long time spent working from the couch or kitchen table. Some are confronting the burnout that comes with less precise boundaries between work and the rest of life; others, company policy allowing, may decide they’d rather not return to an office. But while many people are experiencing this lifestyle for the first time, it’s just about the oldest way to do business. “It would have been the most familiar thing for people throughout history,” says Sandy Isenstadt, a professor of architectural history at the University of Delaware. Artisans produced their wares at home, often in ground-floor workspaces below their living quarters, and sold them from home or at markets. In the United States, work only shifted out of the home in a major way during the Industrial Revolution, as factories began churning out those same goods.
As paid work moved out of the home in the 19th century, the domestic sphere also took on new meaning. The “cult of domesticity” that took root in middle- and upper-class life in the 19th century idealized women as submissive, virtuous keepers of the house. As Laura Turner writes for Pacific Standard, a division sprung up between “public and private, male and female, office and home.” While women’s industrious management of their homes earned a degree of valorization, theirs was not a money-making endeavor and was therefore not valued as highly.
“You get this aggrandisement of the work sphere as opposed to the domestic sphere,” says Isenstadt. “As we all know, there’s still a lot of labor going on in the home, even if it’s not generating income. Anything associated with women is drastically undervalued.”
The growing separation between paid work and home life was reinforced by nuisance laws and, subsequently, late 19th- and early 20th-century zoning regulations, says Isenstadt. Manufacturing and processing was seen as dirty and noisy, so various kinds of work were banned from residential areas, with the exception of professions like law and medicine. Tax law, too, started differentiating between the residential, commercial, and industrial.
Though paid work remained fixed outside the home throughout the 20th century, some professionals carried on working from their houses, particularly creatives and freelancers like artists, writers, and designers. “You look at Charles and Ray Eames’s house and studioin Pacific Palisades, and the Eames philosophy about how work and life were completely entwined. They could not separate one from the other,” says Grenader, who cites Donald Judd’s apartment in New York’s Soho neighborhood as a more urban example of the interplay between an artist’s home and work.