When Wayne West took early retirement after a quarter-century with IBM in Toronto, he had already been planning to set up his computer-hardware consulting business. He and his wife, Jeannine, were also planning to move to a retirement home.
Both plans worked out well. They moved from the big city to the Stonecroft community, in New Hamburg, Ont., and West, now 64, set up a home office in the basement of their new home. And that, according to design experts like Jessica Cotton and David Sapelak, is where he made his mistake.
He’s corrected it, though – in recent months, West has moved his office to one of the best rooms in the house, a bright, light-filled space designed to be a den, near the front door, with a large window offering a view of their front yard and garden.
Cotton and Sapelak would approve. Sapelak – an interior designer and member of the Association of Registered Interior Designers of Ontario – points out that empty nesters who are creating home offices have a unique opportunity: “One of the most satisfying things about working at home is having the ‘corner office’ you were never able to have, the office with the great view, with the presence of nature.”
Jessica Cotton is an interior designer and principal owner of Jessica Cotton Design; she is well known as an HGTV and Food Network Design Host. Cotton is blunt about the traditional basement location: “You rarely hear of anyone in their basement anymore, unless there’s a walk-out.”
The two experts agree on key elements of a successful home office – light, comfort, flexibility, a sense of esthetics.
When longtime partners Joyce Tonner and Diane Bialek planned their new home near Woodstock, Ont., they were looking ahead a few years to retirement, and incorporated two home offices into the design. Like West, both women have working offices – Tonner designs mathematics curricula, Bialek is a musician. But because both of these 50-year-olds have adult children who come home to visit, they added a bed in each of the home offices, so the spaces double as guest rooms.
The most pleasing element of Tonner’s office is an interior window. Not only do these second-floor spaces have large windows looking out into their fledgling rock gardens and meadow, the office has a glass-less window right in front of the work station that looks out onto the great room, a two-storey space with a fireplace topped by a indoor, rock waterfall.
This is the kind of design Cotton refers to when she says, “The key is flexibility and lifestyle.”
And whether a person is designing their space from scratch, like Tonner and Bialek, or adapting an existing or new home, like West, she stresses that this is a unique “opportunity to create their own workplace.”
Sapelak is blunt: “You can’t bury this office in a basement room with no windows, or in the smallest room in the house.” This is not the time to be a home-office martyr; Cotton urges people to “get really excited about it... it’s a really fun thing.”
This isn’t just about looking good – office location has a lot to do with feeling good, too. Sapelak says, “You have to realize, if you’re working at home, you still need connections.” Too often, people work in a basement environment, cut off from everyone and everything, and come to hate their workspace. The experts strongly recommend home offices that maintain visual contact with other rooms, and if possible with the outdoors.
Sapelak has worked for decades from a home office that incorporated colour, windows looking into his garden, lots of height, and a skylight. And now he has new opportunity to plan a perfect workspace– he and his wife Sharon have just moved out of that house, and are building a new home in Kitchener, designed to meet their retirement requirements, and with an office that will include all the advantages he appreciated in his previous digs, as well as some solutions he discovered along the way.
It’s a sure bet that one element of his new office will be space. He strongly urges people building or adapting a home office to make it big enough. “Don’t push the desk up against the wall,” he says, “give yourself space in front of wherever you work.”
He has recently been working with a couple who are family counsellors, working from their home. They needed plenty of space with lots of light and privacy. They ultimately decided to rework the usages of their home, turning their spacious family room into their large, private office. “They’ve made a very wise choice. They need a very comfortable, sunny space” that also happens to look out onto their garden.
Cotton says the focus on “comfort” should not stop with the overall space. She urges clients to consider comfort in every decision – the office chair, the desk, the decor. She suggests that too many people furnish their offices with a mish-mash of cast-off furniture, and instead recommends that since so much time is spent in this space, it should be pleasing and satisfying. She encourages people “to think of it as more of an extension of the other rooms in the house... they should approach it much as they would their living room.”
Sapelak suggests, to achieve additional workspace, begin with a router, the device that allows your home to have wireless computer connections. That means you can work on your laptop wherever you choose.
Both experts are used to thinking outside the box; Sapelak, for example, points to the potential for creating a home office in an outbuilding, especially if the existing house does not provide the ideal setting. Nigel Gordijk is a home-based web designer who moved to Canada from his native England two years ago. His home includes an attached, double garage – each morning, he leaves the house, walks about eight paces through the garage to the back third of that structure, and enters a spacious, well-appointed, bright office built into the far corner of the garage. He literally leaves the house and goes to work – a few seconds away.
When it comes to designing your home office, Cotton sums it up well: “You want something that makes you happy.”
