Before the pandemic, architect David Hart noticed a growing glimmer of interest in a somewhat unfashionable interior feature: the home office. Hart is the president and CEO of Steinberg Hart, a firm that designs large mixed-use apartment complexes in cities around the world, among other projects. His clients had lately been asking about reducing the size of closets and bathrooms in favor of creating a small nook or alcove that fits a desk. Pre-Covid-19, only 10% to 15% percent of the apartment units his firm was building had some type of dedicated office space. Going forward, he says, he expects that figure will be more like 75%.
After fading in popularity since the 1990s, home offices have again become coveted real estate. Since coronavirus closed workplaces in cities nationwide, Americans’ work habits and environments have changed dramatically, with millions of professionals suddenly working from home. Affluent teleworkers are spending six figures installing high-end home offices, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The rest of us are sharing kitchen table and desk space with roommates, partners and children who are now homeschooled. Young urbanites in small apartments have had to get particularly creative in carving out a workspace, perching with laptops from hallways, closets and bathrooms. And thanks to another pandemic office staple, the videoconferencing platform Zoom, we’re able to change our actual background to what appears to be a much nicer office during video meetings.
The convergence of working and living space is forcing Americans in the stay-at-home age to reconsider the function and design of those homes. Many are looking at the likelihood of long-term telework for at least part of the week even after the pandemic passes. Working at home may be here to stay, and more widely accepted than ever. But what should these reconfigured home workspaces look like? And how did our offices end up in our homes in the first place?
From cabinets to cubicles: the dawn of the home office
The home office as most Americans think of it today — a dedicated room outfitted with office furniture and equipment — is a distant descendant of the Victorian library: a room where upper-crust men could collect their thoughts, books, and paraphernalia like busts and globes that demonstrated that they were educated and well-traveled. Especially on rural estates, the libraries located in the homes of 18th- and 19th-century landowners in Europe and the U.S. also served as offices, according to Alex T. Anderson, associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington. Though libraries continued to be a staple of wealthy, single-family homes, they were one of the many single-purpose Victorian rooms — like billiard rooms, solariums, and drawing rooms — that didn’t make their way into middle-class houses in the 20th century retaining their original form and function.
But the idea of having an office space inside a private home predates the Victorians. Aristocrats and plantation owners typically had some version of a home office. “Large houses often had a separate, small, private and easily heated room called a ‘cabinet,’ which served more exclusively as an office for correspondence or other kinds of desk work,” says Anderson, noting that this is also where you’d find furniture designed for the purpose of correspondence, such as a secretary.
One enthusiastic remote worker was Thomas Jefferson, whose cabinet at Monticello boasted an enviable collection of early 19th-century office equipment, including a homemade five-sided standing desk and a “polygraph” machine that allowed him to make multiple copies of his voluminous correspondence.
For a long time, most offices were, in fact, home offices, Hart says . Business owners often “lived above the shop” and had a dedicated workspace for performing the administrative tasks. They also took the form of designating a corner of a workshop as an office through the placement of a writing desk, similar to the setup the Wright brothers had in their bicycle shop. “Yes, there are people who had a separate room [that functioned as an office], but from what we see in design legacy, [the home office] began with a desk for writing letters within a shop,” Hart says. This desk — which was sometimes located in a small alcove — allowed a person to disengage from their shop or factory work for a moment, and focus on the clerical side of the job.
Though there wasn’t typically a traditional office component, working from home was also extremely common in tenements in the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Kat Lloyd, director of programs at the Tenement Museum in New York City. “At the museum, we talk about different families who lived in two tenement buildings over about 150 years as early as the 1860s, all the way through the end of the 20th century,” she says, “and how throughout different decades, we see people working from their home for different reasons and in different industries.”
In some cases, members of a family took on additional work like laundry or childcare for small amounts of money. In other situations, a family may have operated an entire business with several employees out of a 325-square foot apartment — conditions that gave rise to the term “sweatshop.” The sewing machine belonging to the head of the family might double as a desk, providing a workspace for the administrative side of the job without taking away any valuable manufacturing real estate in the room.