Welcome to Your Home Sweet Office

Wired in Every Room

A big part of planning is thinking through the location of phone and cable jacks. Home offices require scads of electronic equipment. A properly designed home office must include a large number of outlets and jacks.

For Toll Brothers Inc., home offices rarely require special steps. All of the company's large houses -- those totaling 3,200 square feet and more -- come with home office space built in.

But the buyers of Toll Brothers' smaller homes, even those living in townhouses, can easily decide to use a second bedroom or other space as an office, said William Gilligan, regional president with the Dulles office of the company. Making that decision up front lets the builder make the needed upgrades.

"About the only things they need are cables and high-speed Internet jacks," Gilligan said. "We offer structured wiring packages at all price points. Our buyers can customize it so that it fits their need. We also see a lot of people going wireless, so that they don't even need a home office space. That really is making it easier for people to work from home."

More work-from-home types are investing in wireless service, which allows them to connect to the Internet and send and receive e-mail without plugging their computers into jacks.

This, obviously, provides flexibility for homeowners. They can tote their laptop computers anywhere and still work.

It's little surprise, then, that wireless capability, and the wiring that allows for it, is becoming a selling point for the developers of single-family houses, condominiums and apartments.

"When computers started being used by a lot of people, we had to design a place for them. There were large desktop units with big monitors and printers. We needed to find a place for that equipment in urban apartments," said Andrew Gutowski, vice president of development with Reston-based Waterford Development, a developer of city apartment and condominium buildings. "Now, though, with wireless computing and with the miniaturization of the equipment people use to work from home, the whole process has changed."

Miniaturization -- the fact that computers, fax machines and other home-office equipment have shrunk -- is what interests Gutowski most. While it has made designing working spaces a bit easier, it has also led to the need for more planning. Because the residents of Waterford's developments are working from every area of the home -- toting their small laptops and portable printers into the kitchen, the bedroom or anywhere else they want to work -- Gutowski must make sure that every room has the connections needed to allow people to log on to the Internet.

"We have to make sure there are many more computer ports throughout the home," Gutowski said. "Every room might have, instead of one, two in every room. That way someone can move around if he still wants to be hooked up to a hard wire connection. Basically, we've eliminated the computer niche that we used to design. We don't need it anymore. We just make sure that wherever people are going to sit, there is a computer port near them. If the people are going to be working at a kitchen table, let's put a power outlet and computer port near the table. Let's make sure the kitchen has a convenient place to plug in."

With improved technology, the den has become a more important room in Waterford's designs, especially the company's urban high-rises. Many residents use the room as both a home office and an extra bedroom, often at the same time. Waterford's designers will concentrate tech equipment -- hard wiring inside the walls, extra computer ports, additional power outlets -- along one or two walls in the room.

"We have to keep our residents happy when it comes to technology," Gutowski said. "We have to do things we didn't do before to get them that level of satisfaction. Traditionally, when you built a building, you'd go to the cable and telephone company to wire it and call us when they are done. But today people are not satisfied with that approach. We as a company have to be able to take matters into our own hands. We have retained our own telecommunications consultant. We install our own systems in the building, and that's become something people are expecting."

At the company's latest project, the mixed-use Spectrum in downtown Falls Church, Waterford is installing fiber-optic wiring to every floor. The wiring provides users fast wireless broadband connections to the Internet. This way, residents can work from whatever part of their unit they desire.

"It's tremendously popular with our buyers," Gutowski said. "You don't need a modem. You can network in your home. All you need is a router, and it's just like being in an office. Our demographics, the young urban professionals, are demanding and expecting this sort of seamless plug-and-play environment. The only way we can deliver this is by taking control of the installation and service right to the homes."