Working from home or living at work? We asked the company to draw and discuss their WFH setup in an effort to further understand anecdotal experiences shared across our virtual office. Through the responses we can better understand how well our homes are coping with new methods of working, in order to inform and drive change in future housing design. Here are some of the responses…

The office and work life have now been superimposed over our homes for four months. The situation has unwillingly exposed issues with the performance of our homes and their fitness for purpose within the accelerated shifting working culture. Many of our home environments have suffered due to their lack of dedicated, or suitably adaptable home-working spaces.

It is clear that recent working methodologies which we have naturally adopted for communicating , such video calls and conferencing, can be extremely intrusive on the home and home life. The physical boundaries between work and home have now all but disappeared and this can begin to permeate across psychological confines, impacting our health and well-being .

The killing of the commute facilitated additional time in the day to spend more time in our homes to reconnect with our families and develop new skills. This further emphasised the disparity between the haves and have nots; who has suitable quantity and quality of space with good natural light, meaningful amenity, or a home office?

The lockdown has reinforced the necessity for good housing design and the importance of quality indoor and outdoor amenity spaces. A home-working space is likely to become a essential addition to our understanding of contemporary housing design, however we must ensure that the focus remains on our homes being a place of retreat.