What Happened When the Office Came Home

Since coronavirus lockdowns forced workers to take their jobs home, the home office has once again become a much-coveted feature of modern living.

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.

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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.

At the end of the 19th century, most people lived within walking distance of their job, whether that was on a farm, at a factory, or a shop in a city. The rise of mass transit, and later automobiles, meant that people were no longer geographically bound to a certain area based on their place of employment. "That allowed people to live much farther away from where they work — that's one reason why the home office has taken off," says Richard Guy Wilson, commonwealth professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia.

As industrialization and urbanization fed the growth of white-collar professions, we began to see the rise of the office building as we know it today in both the public and private sector; what Hart refers to as "places for files, centralized repositories for information." In other words, the physical files and documentation you needed to complete most of your tasks were only available in the office. While you may have been able to shuttle some of your papers to and from the office in a briefcase, the bulk of your job was done in a space you shared with your colleagues, featuring a design and culture distinctly separate from your home.

The nature of this type of office work, and the function of the office as the place where all the important information was kept (and therefore, the only place work could be done), meant that once people left the office, they could, at least in theory, use the remainder of their time for home responsibilities and leisure activities. For many, this is when the formal segregation of work and life began.

Studies, guest rooms and kitchen desks

As the 20th century progressed, so too did the concept of at-home workspaces. Anderson points out that some Modernist homes designed prior to 1940 included a studio — for painting, sculpture, or photography — that functioned as the primary work space for an artist living in the house (i.e. the house Le Corbusier designed for Amédée Ozenfant in 1922). Though most homes built between the end of World War II and the 1960s were small —  meant to be options for families who had previously lived in apartments — some on the higher-end did include an additional room called a "study," which could function as a guest bedroom or home office. They were typically located off of the living room, placing them in the public sphere of the house, along with the powder room — making them accessible for guests, though separate from the family's private living quarters, says Jessica Sewell, associate professor of urban and environmental planning and American studies, and co-director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia.

For their even more well-heeled clientele, mid-century architects also factored entertaining guests for work-related events into their designs. For example, a house from the 1940s designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen for John Entenza, a well-known magazine publisher, included not only a home office, but also a larger designated space for entertaining. "What I find interesting about the Modernist home office is its association with entertaining," Anderson says. "Very often a certain kind of work happened over cocktails or dinner in the mid-20th century, and the office served as a sort of supplement to that."

But at this point, having a study or some version of a home office was the exception, not the norm. While conducting research for an upcoming book on gender and the mid-century home, Sewell went through Architectural Record as well as Case Study Houses, and found that only one out of every 10 included the guest room/study in the original plans — the exception being if the client was a single professor or had another reason to stipulate a home office. "And that space is always male," she says.

Sewell describes one brief she read for a mid-century home design competition in Indianapolis, where the wife was a magazine writer. None of the submissions included an office or study for her, but the winning design did provide her with a desk in the bedroom. That plan "gives more space for the son's hobbies and the father's hobbies than they do for the woman's profession," Sewell says.

In the postwar period, the American woman's primary job was seen as being a wife and managing a household, doing everything from cooking and cleaning to childcare to overseeing budgets. As Sewell explains, it didn't make sense for a woman in this situation to have her own office closed off from the rest of the house: Hence, the kitchen desk was born.

"It's the idea that she has a place from which to organize the household," Sewell says. "The desk in the kitchen makes sense, because by the mid-century, the idea that the kitchen is a space — once you start to get more open-plan houses — from which the mother cooks, while also supervising children. So if she's going to do anything that involves sitting down at the desk, it's going to be right there. She's going to be in the most public spot of the house."

For some households, this did eventually change. After the children moved out, the mother, in some cases, was able to claim one of their former bedrooms as her own office or personal space — but only once she was no longer required to be stationed at her kitchen desk command center.

Another part of Sewell's research focuses on mid-century bachelor pads — the kind of hi-fi-equipped male lairs that were featured in the pages of Playboy. These, she says, always had either a dedicated study, or a very visible desk or drafting table in the living room. "I see that as signaling a certain kind of cultivated professional identity — a piece of who they are, because they are being defined by their profession outside the home in the world at large," Sewell says. "Whereas women are being defined by being a mother or a potential mother or caretaker. It's only a single professional woman living in a house by herself who might have a study."

Even today — as men and women alike work from home in unprecedented numbers — if someone was asked to describe a typical imaginary home office, it would likely include traditionally masculine features like dark wood furniture, built-in bookshelves full of leather-bound volumes, and an oversized desk and chair. "That's coming straight out of Victorian ideas of the masculine space," Sewell says. "The masculine offices are very much the kind of style that then comes into the home office or the study. It's got this upper-class English pretension. It's a grand Victorian library, in miniature."

As such, dedicated home offices in postwar homes were typically the most masculine-looking rooms in the house. For instance, if the rest of a home was painted in light colors, the study may have had dark wood paneling, Sewell says. "By the 1950s, there's this feeling that a house is a place that is for children and run by women, with men feeling like there's not really a place for them," she says. As a reaction to that, and as houses grew bigger in 1970s, 1980s and beyond, it became increasingly common to have some sort of designated male space in homes, harkening back to the idea of a Victorian library or study.

If this concept sounds familiar, it's because it's the same logic behind the "man cave" — the knotty-pine club basement or big-screen-TV-strewn finished garage that, unlike say, the kitchen or living room, or other "female-focused" parts of the house, a man can finally have the private space he rightfully deserves. This also makes sense in the context of our shift from our identity stemming from our occupation, to also including what you consume or do for a hobby. Modern man caves, therefore, are more likely to look like sports bars than Victorian libraries.

In a pandemic, the home office is where you make it

Though we tend to think of a home office as a dedicated room, that's not necessarily the case. In Victorian times, a secretary (the piece of furniture, not the human) could be placed in a parlor, or a writing desk could be situated in a bedroom. And, of course, there's the kitchen desk. In these cases, the "office" component has more to do with the furniture than the actual room itself. Today, as homebound workers search for a place to do their jobs, the addition of a desk or laptop stand can transform a room or part of a room into a home office. Though Target, IKEA and online retailers have replaced the Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery Ward catalogs, the concept of using furniture to carve out a space for your home office remains the same. Even the Internal Revenue Service recognizes that a home office doesn't have to be its own dedicated room (although, in order to deduct a workspace, it must be used "regularly and exclusively" for business).

Aside from furniture, technology has driven most of the major recent shifts regarding the home office. Between the 1970s and 1990s, equipment like typewriters, fax machines, boxy personal computers, multi-line telephones, copy machines and scanners were the space-hungry and expensive gear that defined a proper home office. A dedicated room was often needed because of the sheer number of bulky electronics that were in regular use at the time. But as computers became smaller and more powerful, that need faded, and the popularity of home offices ebbed with it. Hart says he he'd been seeing a steady migration away from dedicated home offices over the past 20 years, thanks in part to the accessibility of laptops, tablets, and smartphones that allow people to perform most, if not all, of their work tasks from anywhere — including in bed or on the couch.  

Similarly, the rise of "third space" workplaces such as coffeeshops offered a more appealing job-site option than a cramped urban apartment. Until Covid-19 arrived, the free WiFi and buzzy vibe of the local Starbucks helped make such coffeeshops de facto home offices for legions of laptop-toting knowledge workers. As the company closes hundreds of its stores thanks to coronavirus-related losses, it's not yet clear when and if these patrons will return.

As many employees sent home by coronavirus have discovered, the flexibility that the latest telework technology offers also comes with new problems, especially when it comes to the now-ubiquitous video calls and meetings that comprise large portions of many workdays. Without a soundproof and private office space, participation in Zoom conferences can be a grim exercise in managing background noise, pet interruptions, and unflattering lighting. As a result, Hart thinks that post-Covid home offices and workspaces will be designed to stress lighting and acoustics — essentially, we'll be working in soundproofed videoconferencing studios. "All of these things are being curated and thought about, because now this is the environment that you are projecting," he says.

The renewed emphasis on dedicated home offices will persist even as the pandemic passes, Hart predicts. Now that millions have gotten a tantalizing taste of life without daily commuting, we'll insist on keeping one foot of our laboring lives in our homes. Several major employers seem to have soured on the expense and health challenges associated with operating traditional large centralized office spaces; for plenty of workers, there may be no office building to return to.

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Indeed, the most coveted amenity of the post-pandemic home may be an extravagant variation on the home office: the double or even triple office, with two or more separate workspaces within a household, so that spouses and kids can all get through their respective working and schooling days with less friction.

"Now that we've proven that we have access to all this information, we don't have to be co-located to access the resources that we need to do our jobs," Hart says. "Probably over the next two to 10 years there'll be a continual evolution of how we think about the home office versus the central office."

About the Author Elizabeth Yuko

Elizabeth Yuko is a bioethicist and journalist.

when the husband came home too soon from the office