Rise of the home office
Some find it hard to believe, but the den and home office are siblings from the same family. It’s just that one is a bit of a slacker and the other a definite Type-A. Think about it. The den is where mom hid dad’s walnut-veneer bar, shoving it next to that hideous big screen TV, the one with the picture that looked like it was being transmitted through the murky bottom of a fish tank, that he got just before the kickoff of Super Bowl XX in 1986. In fact, the den and TV go together like football and beer commercials. Where would one be without the other? At first we expected the brainiac PC to share accommodations with the slack-witted boob-tube, but it didn’t take Dr. Laura to tell us that the relationship wasn’t going to work. It soon became obvious that once everyone became more interested in anonymously chatting with strangers who didn’t know what we really looked like instead of watching reruns of “Happy Days,” the computer was destined to trump the TV as the new king of the household.
And the king needed his own space. We converted bedrooms, dedicated basements, carved out kitchen nooks, floated airy lofts and rehabbed shaggy dens so that he--and we--might be more comfortable. It’s not that we’ve abandoned the TV. It’s just that we’ve decided he can go anywhere--hidden in an antique armoire, paraded as flat-screen art, unceremoniously dumped in the bedroom--while we’ve gussied up his old digs, the slightly threadbare den, and turned it into the sleek techno-haven--the home office--for our new favorite, the computer and all his techie brethren.
“Everybody has to have a home office these days,” says Santa Monica architect Brian Murphy. A home office, acknowledges Murphy, is almost as important to his clients as luxury bathrooms and a tricked-out kitchen. “We just did a 3,000-foot addition on the back of a house in Santa Monica that included a dark room and a place to wash the dogs. But the upper level was devoted to two studio offices. His and hers. With gorgeous views of the Pacific.” The home office, for a lot of people, has become as important as the master bedroom.
Consider this: trend guru Faith Popcorn, who has blithely predicted that by 2005 over 20 million people will be working at home--double the current figure--has her own line of home office furniture for women. The line may be saddled with an unfortunate moniker--Hooker Furniture--but no one really doubts Popcorn’s assumptions that home offices, filled with stylish, comfy furniture, are now a standard feature in most new home construction. “The growth in home offices has been phenomenal,” says Kim D. Shaver, director of marketing communications for Virginia-based Hooker, a leading manufacturer of upscale home office furniture. Shaver says the Virginia-based company saw a 40 to 50% growth rate in annual sales during the ‘90s, increasing from about $10 million 10 years ago to over $60 million last year.
What’s driving the boom in home offices, experts say, is technology, in particular, the computer which, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, is currently in 56% of U.S. households. If you’ve got the type of a job that can be accomplished using a computer connected to the internet (and, according to research cited by Shaver, of the 22 million people who claim to be self-employed, about 8 million rely primarily on the internet for their business), why bother to go into a regular office? Paul and Sarah Edwards, who have touted the joys of self-employment in 14 books including “Working From Home,” moved, on a whim, from Santa Monica to a remote hamlet in the Los Padres National Forest in 1999. “We had never heard of Pine Mountain Club but we spent a Fourth of July weekend there with friends, loved it, and two days later, we were looking for houses,” says Paul in a phone conversation from his home office which, he says, has views of mountains and lakes. “If you can earn your living working at home in a place you want to live, why wouldn’t you?”
Wendy Marlett, senior vice-president of marketing for KB Homes, one of the largest housing developers in Southern California, says a recent poll by the company showed that more than 60% of home buyers surveyed thought having a home office was either “essential or very important” in their decision-making process. The Meyers Group, a real estate information company in Irvine, believes that more and more homeowners will convert a room in the house to a home office. “I’d be surprised if at least half the homes don’t already have a space set aside as some sort of a home office already, and our research shows that trend only getting bigger,” says Tim Sullivan, in charge of real estate information for the firm.
Sometimes the desire for a state-of-the-art home office even drives the decision to build a new home in the first place. Such was the case with Dean Patton, a highly sought-after designer who pulled out of a bustling Los Angeles design firm seven years ago when the commute from his home in south Orange County became too much. Patton figured he’d just set up shop in an extra bedroom of the house--a common solution to many first home offices. “Shortly after I started my own business, I’m on the phone with a big client and my two-year-old is in the bathroom, yelling. That’s when I knew I needed to separate the home from the home office.”
So the Pattons, who were thinking of moving anyway, began thinking of building a new home. One that would not only would have separate office space but its own dedicated entry as well. And since Patton wanted the design studio to have a very contemporary feel, the living spaces of their new San Clemente home, with colored concrete floors and a 20-foot-by-20-foot great room, with exposed ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, followed suit.
Patton’s 700-square-foot office has the feel of an ad agency, he says, which he hopes makes clients feel more comfortable when visiting. Not that that happens very often. “Fewer than one out of 10 of my clients ever show up here,” he said. “But if they do, I feel very comfortable and so do they.”
But while lots of home offices try to button themselves up to look more corporate, a number of architects and designers are finding that the influence works the other way as well. Stanley Felderman, whose Santa Monica-based firm Felderman + Keating was responsible for the playroom look of MTV’s West Coast offices which, he says, were designed to be “a home away from home,” just finished another corporate project in which they turned a former residence into an office. “The idea was that the office became the home.” They’re complete with guest quarters upstairs in case visitors wanted to overnight.
East of Doheny, an entertainment production company, also borrowed design elements from the burgeoning home office trend for their Melrose office in what was once a theater. Lured by the folk art, comfy couches and toys, like remote-controlled cars buzzing around, people often confuse the office site for a design showroom. “It looks like a home--like a cottage,” says David Hamlin, head of business affairs. “This allows us to come here and feel like we haven’t left our homes, which is to say that it was intentionally designed to be an atmosphere that makes people feel comfortable, even if it doesn’t exactly look like anyone’s real home.”
Which brings up an interesting point: an office, whether in the home or elsewhere, doesn’t have to look like home to make us feel at home. “We tend to think of homey as making reference to traditional residences,” says Felderman. “But there’s also a sense that something ‘homey,’ whether a corporate office or home office, is simply a place that makes you feel good. There’s a visceral sense to it that makes us more relaxed.”
That’s certainly the case with Aron Orton’s home office in a Silver Lake townhouse. Orton, who spends eight hours a day as a commercial editor for ad agency dGWB, spends almost as much time, in the evenings, as chief executive and sole employee of Dahlia Page Post, his freelance gig, doing graphics and editing for music videos of L.A. groups such as Powder and other clients. His home office takes up almost every square inch of a spare bedroom and, in addition to a high-tech editing bay full of computers and monitors, includes such oddities as antique cameras, x-rays of hands, taxidermied animals and jars of formaldehyde with bats in them.
Not everyone would appreciate Orton’s “homey” touches in his home office but, he says, it allows him to tap into his creative energies. “My office at the ad agency is rather sterile,” says the 31-year-old Orton. “But my home office visually inspires me. When I get tired looking at a monitor, I can just look around the room and get excited. This stuff makes me happy.”
Orton admits that, at first, he was nervous that clients might not feel comfortable doing business in a home office decorated with lava lamps and ceramic hula dolls, but, like Patton, he soon discovered that there was seldom any need for clients to visit at all. “Everyone is used to working with people they never meet, or they meet in a neutral setting like a restaurant or coffee shop. Hardly anyone comes to my home office.”
Still, as far as Dion McCarthy is concerned, the home office needs to take its cues from the corporate office, which means clutter is out. And while the space should feel comfortable, it shouldn’t be too homey. “In the last five years, the home office has gone from an adjunct or satellite to a ‘real’ office to where it is the real office,” says McCarthy, principal of DesignARC, a West LA architectural firm that has done a number of high-end home offices. “When we take on a project, we no longer have the client making references to a mother office. So there’s a desire to make the home office look as professional as possible, which means independent entries, so you don’t have to pass through the kitchen to get to the office, and a sophisticated look that can inspire confidence in clients that visit.”
The biggest challenge for McCarthy is figuring out ways to manage filing systems and communication equipment--computers, printers, FAX machines, and, in many instances, TVs, DVD players, and recording equipment--in a 15-by-20 foot space. “This is all stuff that normally would have been spread out over a three-story high-rise,” says McCarthy, “but not only do we have to get it into a much smaller room, we have to pretty much make it invisible.” Which means a lot of custom design, including running empty conduits behind walls for devices not yet developed, to eliminate clutter.
But while Santa Monica architect Brian Murphy agrees that his biggest design challenge for a home office is finding a place for all the high-tech equipment, he wonders how long we’ll continue to make a big deal out of where we set up our computers. “It’s just like the TV,” he says. “When there’s no cache attached to having computers and FAX machines, people will be less interested in designing rooms to house them. Frankly, as everything gets smaller and more integrated, there might be little reason to even have a home office. The home office will become Starbucks or even the car. And then people will stop saying, ‘Oh, and here’s our home office--and our computer.’”
So, one wonders, should the home office fall out of favor in the years ahead, what will we do with the space? “Well,” Murphy says, with a hint of mischief, “you could always turn it into a really nice guest room.” Or, perhaps, a den?
*
RESOURCE GUIDE
*
Pages 22-25: Architect Brian Alfred Murphy, BAM Construction/Design, Santa Monica, (310) 459-0955. Brian Alfred Murphy Corian and steel 3-by-5-foot conference table, vellum sconces and floor lamp, at BAM Construction/Design. Mario Bellini and Dieter Thiel steel and laminate Metropol desk and return, about $5,000; Aeron chair, $775; Arne Jacobsen ant chairs, about $600 each, at Jules Seltzer Associates, Los Angeles, (310) 274-7243. Pages 26-27: Architectural designer Robert Ramirez, Ramirez Design Inc., Santa Monica, (310) 395-2192. Interior designer Lorri Kline Ramirez, Ramirez Design Inc., Santa Monica, (310) 395-2192. Pages 28-29: Architect Warren W. Wagner, W3 Architects Inc., Venice, (310) 396-5885. Blue McRight 6-by-9-inch paintings on paper, available through Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479. Pages 30-31: Architect Patrick Tighe, Tighe Architecture, Santa Monica, (310) 450-8823. Pages 32-33: Architect Lorcan O’Herlihy, Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, Culver City, (310) 398-0394. Page 34: Loft interior by interior designer Valerie Pasquiou, Interiors + Design, Los Angeles, (323) 653-8588. Valerie Pasquiou “Louis” desk of walnut, colored laminate and chrome, $2,750. Lifto chrome and glass desk lamp by Benjamin Thut, $510, at Diva Collection, Los Angeles, (310) 278-3191. Prima Signora Murano glass and paduc wood floor lamp, $1,152, at Fontana Arte, Los Angeles, (310) 247-9933. The Mobil by Antonio Citterio scratch-resistant polycarbonate file cabinet with drawers, $1,326, at Kartell, Los Angeles, (310) 271-0178. Organic felt art, “Daytrip” by Faith Vincent, $750 each, at faitvinc@aol.com. Page 35: Dawn Haynes, Dusk to Dawn Image Agency, Los Angeles, (323) 850-6783. Excalibur desk chair, 100% Olefin and steel, $499, at Linder Design, Los Angeles, (323) 939-4020. Page 36: Larry Levin office interior design by Sasha Emerson Design, Santa Monica, (310) 230-9948. Page 37: Hagy Belzberg Architects built-in desk/bed headboard, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9611. Maui swivel arm chair with adjustable height, $251, at Kartell, Los Angeles, (310) 271-0178. Page 39: Linda Brettler, architect, Los Angeles, (323) 935-3999. Popsicle table, $3,150, available through Linda Brettler. Dana Hollister’s 1920s silk embroidered throw, vintage pillows and slip velvet drapery, at Odalisque, Los Angeles, (323) 933-9100.
