Create Home Offices That Work Better for Today’s Buyers

If you’re wondering how to update your home office designs for the needs of today's remote workers, the architects, builders, and other experts behind ProBuilder’s Show Village have some ideas for you.

Add a second office. Both The New New Home (designed by architect Michael Woodley of Littleton, Colo., in collaboration with John Burns Real Estate Consulting) and the Thoughtful Home (designed by Daniel Swift of BSB Design in West Des Moines, Iowa) have a primary home office and a second, smaller home office. It may sound like a luxury, but after a year of remote work and school, many homeowners have discovered the value of a home with multiple workspaces.
Think small. Home offices don’t necessarily need to be generously sized, especially if square footage is at a premium. The New New Home is just 2,500 square feet, but it still offers a compact, second home office. In the Thoughtful Home, pocket offices allow buyers to enjoy two dedicated workspaces in the 5,518-square-foot house.
Use design to support buyers’ desire for work-life balance. In the Thoughtful Home, one pocket office is connected to a cozy TV room, and the other is adjacent to a light-flooded exercise room. As a result, homeowners can find quiet and privacy in their offices when it’s time to work--and then close the door on the workday when they’re ready to watch a movie or jump on their exercise bike for a live online class.
Connect workspaces to the outdoors. Workers dream of having a window office; give them that and more at home with windows that open, providing fresh air and natural light, as in the second-floor office in the New New Home. The close-to-outside location of the downstairs pocket office in the Thoughtful Home also echoes findings by John Burns Real Estate Consulting, which discovered that many buyers would like their workspaces on the back, not the front, of their homes.
Include storage. When employees were working at home just a day or so a week, they only needed the essentials: their work laptop and a few files. Now that remote work has become both necessary and accepted in many companies, workers need space to keep their work materials and supplies, as indicated by John Burns Real Estate Consulting’s research into work from home trends. The second home office in The New New Home includes a mix of Wellborn’s open and closed shelving, plus desk drawers, so that remote workers can stay organized.