With many of us now working from home in light of the global pandemic the need for a healthy, optimal home-working space has never been more pressing. As an architect’s practice we have been working from home for over 20 years and have designed many bespoke home offices, including our own, building up a wide range of expertise and design principles for creating joyful, enriching workspaces. Here are our top tips for your home workspace.
Designing for the right kind of natural light
A healthy home worker needs high levels of natural light as this is vital to receiving healthy levels of vitamin D as well as keeping eye fatigue to a minimum - studies have shown that optimising workspaces for good levels of natural light can provide a powerful boost to business productivity and revenue.
We must however be acutely aware that natural light can also cause a range of problems for your home office if not controlled in the right way. Direct sunlight is prone to causing glare, which makes computer screens difficult to read and can be blinding to an otherwise productive home worker. Glare is caused by direct, harsh, south-aspect sunlight, which can also cause overheating in the warmer months if not integrated with a coherent ventilation strategy.
The ideal kind of natural light for a workspace is diffuse light, this is sunlight that has been bounced through the atmosphere prior to reaching your home.
In the northern hemisphere the sun rises in the east, arcing round to the south at midday (when it is at its highest and most intensive and then lowers to set in the west. The ideal orientation for windows to receive diffuse light is therefore the north, negating direct sun rays into your working environment.
Direct sunlight can be brought into your workspace and to great effect if integrated with a thermal mass strategy, but it must be channeled in such a way that it does not directly hit your immediate working area.
Achieving good light levels in your office without direct southern sun through windows will require light from above, likely through skylights. Light levels from skylights are almost always far greater than that of wall mounted windows, this is the case because much of the light received from windows has already bounced off other objects such as the ground, neighbouring buildings and trees, lowering its intensity and frequency range. Skylights negate these photon ricochets and therefore receive a brighter quality of daylight directly from the heavens.
Combining our considerations for diffuse light and sky component light, a great place to put skylights for a home working environment is on a north facing roof slope as we did in our home office.
Nurturing Productivity with Nature
Many studies have shown that connecting to nature visually and within your internal environment can have great effects on lowering our stress levels and improving overall mental health. Our recent guide on connecting your home and garden explores the many ways you can improve this connection within the overall home but in your workspace there are 3 principal ways of connecting to nature.
Nature within your visual field
Placing natural elements within view from your workspace has been shown to have great calming benefits, exploiting what architect Lance Hosey notes as the “prospect/refuge theory”, which notes that we are happiest with a view of our evolutionary natural environment from a place of safety. This can be achieved by framing views out to nature within your workspace, an idea we explored to great extent in our Mereside House project, a house extension which is angled to capture great views across a nearby freshwater lake and nature reserve.
Medical studies have shown that a view onto a lush garden directly impacts your health and wellbeing. By creating a strong visual connection between living space & garden in our East Yorkshire Passivhaus we achieve a tranquil, natural feeling within the home and orientate the house away from a busy street on the opposing side. A visual connection to nature can also provide great benefits in a dense urban setting, we maximised a small Beverley townhouse’s garden relationship through a contemporary sunspace, allowing the client’s Japanese themed garden to flow into the home.
A Healthy Nature Filled Workspace
Once your visual nature connection has been established, the next best thing to integrate into a home office design is areas to place plants and spaces that nurture and sustain them. By embedding plants and flowers throughout your home’s interior (in spaces which enable them to thrive) you can greatly improve the internal environment of your home whilst further dissolving the boundary of garden and home. The danger of indoor pollution is all too real with data suggesting that every year over 4 million people die prematurely from indoor air pollution-related to off-gassing from VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) present in home furnishings and paints.
House plants thrive in double-height, well-lit spaces and their effects are amplified by passive ventilation processes such as stack effect, naturally spreading fresh air up through the home. Our top-lit office space at The Old Forge hosts a 9ft high mature rubber plant which thrives in the double-height sky-lit space as we do, purifying our air, tempering internal humidity and removing any airborne contaminants. The double-height solar atrium in Twin House is placed centrally within the home, between the original cottage and our new extension allowing ventilation currents to pass throughout each wing of the home.
Deep window reveals also enable the accommodation of plants in the path of incoming fresh air, purifying it as it enters your home office, as seen in our Scarborough Passivhaus which has thick, hyper-insulated walls making it ideal for planted ledges. Particular species of house plants have been noted for their effects in home environments including Chlorophytum comosum (spider plants), Ficus elastica (Rubber Plants) and Dracaena fragrans (Dragon plants) have all been shown to provide good health benefits within the workspace.
A Seamless Physical Connection to Nature
Your home office design can benefit greatly from nature-filled breakout spaces which allow your work routine to flow out into the open air. Our home-working project at Queensgate integrated an array of bi-folding glazed doors which provide visual connection to nature but also allow one to flow seamlessly from the working environment to the garden, the project further blended inside and outside through a seamless timber floor finish.
Creating a Warm + Airy Workspace
Once your home office has delightful, optimised natural light levels and a strong connection to nature your next focus must be creating a warm, well ventilated internal environment.
“The best (and cheapest) way to heat and ventilate your office is through passive solar design techniques.”
This can be done artificially through very costly air conditioning units and a heavy reliance on ever more expensive mains heating, but this will be disastrous for your financial wellbeing as well as our environment. Through careful architectural strategies you can achieve a space that automatically has the best conditions for home productivity with no active cost.
The best (and cheapest) way to heat and ventilate your office is through passive solar design techniques (see guide) - an example would be to use a thermally massive floor (stone or concrete at least 100mm thick), exposed to direct solar gain, the floor will soak up the sun’s heat which will warm the air of your office causing it to rise, stimulating stack ventilation which can be furthered in a tall space with openable skylights which will act as a natural exhaust drawing waste air out. In the colder months when you want to retain the heat of your home whilst letting fresh air in integrating renewable energy systems such as solar panels, air source heat pumps can power mechanical ventilation heat recovery systems (MVHR’s) which provide a constant flow of preheated fresh air lowering your heating costs by ~90%. We recently completed a project for a home extension that integrated all these ideas to achieve a house that generated a profit in surplus energy supplied back to the national grid.
Integrated Activity Zones for a productive work routine
Working from home can often leave you prone to distraction and interruption with low levels of productivity. Psychological research has shown that clearly defined zones within within the home have a positive effect on productivity as they instil a sense of routine between working and living zones. In a photography studio we designed we articulated one workstation corner, divided from the living area with a central column and a room dividing shelf, providing useful ergonomic storage at arms length from the client’s desk whilst clearly defining the boundaries of the working zone.
A central column and divider shelving clearly articulate Queensgate studio’s work zones and living zones.
A dedicated home office, physically divided from the rest of your home also prevents the impromptu distractions of family life. Queensgate Studio is located a garden length from the family terrace house which enables a degree of physical, acoustic and mental separation from domestic distractions.
If your workspace is within your home, careful consideration should be made to where it is in the plan. Your home office should not be near busy circulation zones or adjacent to loud activity areas such as the living area or kitchen. Our Chilterns Oak House in Stoke Row integrates a home office away from these areas with framed views out to the garden. This home has a smooth laminated timber floor finish, allowing you to smoothly glide around your office, it also makes bringing cables under and through the floor simple and tidy.
This home office in our Chilterns Oak House, has a smooth laminated timber floor finish, allowing you to smoothly glide around your office, it also makes bringing cables under and through the floor simple and tidy.
