Welcome to Your Home Sweet Office
Workers' Demands Increasingly Shape Builders' Designs

By Dan Rafter
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 18, 2006

Like millions of other people, Francie Dalton works from her home. But unlike most home offices, Dalton's workplace in her three-story house in Columbia is carefully planned.

Dalton's office is not a tiny desk shoved in the corner of her bedroom. It isn't a computer on her kitchen counter that she pushes aside whenever she needs to toast some bagels. It's not a pile of papers and pens balanced on the edge of her kitchen table.

Dalton, president and founder of business consulting firm Dalton Alliances Inc. has dedicated the entire lower floor of her house to an office that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. She can close her door to shut out the noise of the outside world if she prefers. She relies on a wireless laptop computer and uses a hands-free telephone so she can roam her home and still work if the mood strikes her. She sits in a chair specifically selected to provide the most comfort for those long nights in front of the computer. She even made sure she has her ideal view, her office windows looking out onto a wooded back yard filled with birds and other critters.

And for those particularly stressful days? Dalton's office includes a space for her exercise equipment. If she is feeling tense, she just hops onto her treadmill until the stress evaporates.

"It's important to get creative when you are putting together your home office," said Dalton, who adapted existing rooms in her house after buying it. "It needs to be a place you enjoy being in. The beauty of working from home is that you can be flexible. You don't have to be tied into any one location or any one way of working. You should take advantage of that."

The Census Bureau's "Working at Home: 2000" report, now a bit outdated, estimated that 4.2 million Americans older than 16 log a significant portion of their work hours at home. That was up 23 percent from 1990.

These home workers need home offices, and these home offices frequently demand computers equipped with Internet access, fax machines, copiers and scanners. Some home workers need extensive storage space for their papers and files, while others need shelves crammed with reference books.

The demands from this growing work-at-home contingent are changing the way builders design homes.

"The office used to be just another room," said Josh Rosenthal, director of marketing at Potomac-based Rosenthal Homes, a custom builder. "Often it was just an unused bedroom, a space that evolved into an office later on. Now the home office is more of a focus in the design process. Having a functional, well-thought-out home office is a specific desire of more homeowners. The level of finishes in a home office is much more of an important factor. Everyone wants it to function like an office but still look like a house."

Builders have become adept at hiding wires, blending file cabinets into a room's decor and making it easy for owners to make those computers and monitors seem no more obtrusive than a television set.

"I've seen so many changes in home design," said Greg Wessling, chairman and chief executive of HouseRaising Inc., a custom builder with headquarters in Charlotte. "I remember when people agonized over the ceramic tile in the bathroom. Now, they are more thinking of automation, wiring, technology. It's a big deal for people, and it's a great opportunity for builders who are really knowledgeable about this to gain a great deal of business."

Joel Sommer, president of Bethesda-based Sommer Homes, another custom builder, said planning for a home office -- and for the equipment such an office requires -- has become a more common task. Not all of his clients, though, want their home offices in the same space.

Some want Sommer to design home-office space that is connected to their master bedrooms. Offices replace the sitting room that some homes have traditionally attached to the master-bedroom suite. Some owners want smaller offices near the rear of their residences, usually on the first floor. Others want more of a separation and will ask builders to place their work-from-home space in a designated area of their new home's lower level, far from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the residence.

Sommer is involved in the entire process as homeowners make these decisions.

"We work with the homeowners on this right from the very beginning of the process," he said. "We get to stick our noses in right from the start. That's important if you want the home office to look like a natural part of the house, and not just as something you set up years after the home was designed."

Hiding the Evidence

The biggest challenge homeowners face with home offices is that they tend to get messy. Builders can help ease this problem by making it simple for owners to hide their office equipment when they are not using it.

This, actually, isn't much of a challenge, builders say. For instance, it's easy to design spaces to hide computers, even big, bulky ones, Sommer said. He will often design wood cabinets, ventilated of course, that hide the larger parts of a computer system. By drilling holes in the back, Sommer can run wires to the machines, so that visitors don't immediately see a rat's nest of computer, fax and copier wires. These same cabinets can hide fax machines, copiers and scanners. Sommer also designs deep drawers that homeowners can use as file cabinets, eliminating the need for space-chewing metal or stand-alone versions.

As technology has improved, and as computer monitors have become smaller and flatter, they no longer gobble up huge portions of a desk, making it easier for builders to incorporate them into a home's design. Smaller monitors also look neater and do not have to be hidden from view when they're not in use.

Sommer, though, is more frequently working with owners who have multiple monitors in their home offices. Several of his clients use traditional monitors for most of their daily work, but then rely on large-screen versions when making presentations to clients. In such situations, Sommer will often mount the second large-screen monitor in a home office's wall, where it looks like a flat-screen television. The owner would then sit at his desk and use his mouse to point at charts or information on his smaller on-desk monitor while his client would watch the same actions taking place on the wall-mounted screen.

"It's all about making the home office comfortable," Sommer said. "It's about hiding wires, the computers themselves, all the other equipment, so that the office looks like part of the home. This is something that a lot of my clients are interested in. Many of my clients are doctors and lawyers or successful businessmen. They do a lot of work from home, and spend a lot of time in their home offices. They want them to be comfortable and functional."

Rosenthal, too, is seeing a greater demand for integrated home offices that look as if they were planned from the beginning.

His company recently built a house in Potomac for a lawyer who logged long hours working from home. The key to making the office work, Rosenthal said, was the large number of built-ins that his crew installed.

The office includes a hidden cabinet that the owner swings out when he wants access to a shredder, hidden keyboard, printer and fax machine. The cabinet is made of the same wood and built by the same craftsmen as is the rest of the wood in the house. And that's just one custom-built hiding space. When visitors enter the office, all they see that is work-related is a monitor and telephone.

"We are a custom home builder, so we deal with a lot of higher-end clientele," Rosenthal said. "Most work very hard for their money. Many of them want the opportunity to come home, have dinner with their family and, if they have a suitable home office, go and finish their work."

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."