Close to a third of British workers now split the week between home and the office, according to the Office for National Statistics, and in London the figure is higher still. Ollie Pickup, one of them, built a garden workspace to rival any central London start-up – and shares his ideas for doing the same to yours…
Start with the building itself
A confession before the ideas: my own contribution to any building project has always been decorative rather than structural, so anything requiring a spirit level or planning permission was sensibly left to people who know what they’re doing.
When working from home refused to go away – the ONS notes that 45% of workers earning £50,000 or more now hybrid-work, against just 8% of those earning under £20,000, which tells you plenty about who’s building offices at the end of the garden – a proper room beyond the back door started to make sense.
My garden office was built from scratch by Wernham Hogg, a superb, Surrey-based firm working across the county and into my area, south-east London. Smart company honcho Jack has a good sense of humour and is possibly a fan of The Office, given that it shares its name with David Brent’s paper merchants (think of all those hits on Google!). All in, with no plumbing, the amply-sized 4.5-by-7-metre office set me back around £50,000.
For around the same money, Crown Pavilions has spent two decades handcrafting insulated, residential-grade rooms in Britain, its top models named, without evident irony, Buckingham and Sandringham. Koto, an RIBA-chartered studio, will drop a charred-timber cabin of Scandinavian-Japanese calm into your plot in a matter of days. All three of these build options make the 50-pace commute past the bins feel like arriving somewhere.
What follows isn’t an inventory of my own garden office, but a shortlist of ideas: the kit, gadgets and finishing touches worth considering, whether you’re building from scratch or simply upgrading what’s already down there.
Banish the dead spots with NETGEAR’s Orbi 770 Series
An indoor router rarely reaches the bottom of the garden with any conviction, as anyone who has watched a Zoom call freeze mid-sentence will attest. For a garden office, mesh is the answer, and NETGEAR’s Orbi 770 Series is a fine one: a three-pack of WiFi 7 units covering up to 6,750 square feet and up to 100 devices.
Here’s a top tip worth knowing: the satellite will take a wired backhaul, so if you can have an Ethernet cable run out to the room during the build, you’ll get the steadiest connection going. At £589.99, it isn’t the cheapest option, but you can’t put a price on a reliable connection, and wonky WiFi loses you work. In Classic White, it looks the part, too.
Banish the black spots at www.netgear.com.
Insure the connection with NETGEAR’s Nighthawk M7 Pro
Even the best mesh system only performs as well as the broadband feeding it, so a backup plan is worth having – and this is a considerably more elegant one than tethering to your phone. NETGEAR’s Nighthawk M7 Pro is a pocket-sized 5G router offering WiFi 7 speeds of up to 5.8 Gbps and 5G speeds of up to 6 Gbps, connecting up to 64 devices across 1,000 square feet. Should the fixed line falter, it steps in automatically; remove the battery, plug it in via 2.5G Multi-Gig Ethernet, and it will happily serve as your main router instead.
Its greatest benefit, though, is portability. With 13 hours of battery life and 5G roaming across more than 125 countries, it’s just as useful in a departure lounge or a rented villa as it is at the bottom of the garden – handy proof that working from home and working from anywhere aren’t always different things. It’s £899.99, which buys a serious amount of peace of mind.
Take your connection with you at www.netgear.com.
Sit properly with BiGDUG’s Ergo-Tek Mesh Executive chair
You will spend around eight hours a day sat in whatever you choose here, so it pays to select smartly – and the upgraded Ergo-Tek Mesh Executive is a lot of chair for the money. It has been examined and endorsed by a UK-registered chiropractor, Robert Bateman, who was involved in its design, which should reassure anyone whose lower back files a daily complaint.
The clever part is the mesh: where ordinary mesh sags and surrenders its support over the years, the Ergo-Tek’s elastic weave has memory and springs back, so it holds its shape, and you keep yours. Add a height-adjustable backrest, proper lumbar adjustment, multi-directional arms and a headrest, and you can tune it precisely to your frame. It’s around £129, with an extended five-year warranty.
Take a seat at www.bigdug.co.uk.
Ground the room with Weaver Green’s Temple rug in Kelp
A rug is the fastest way to stop a timber box reading as a shed, and this is a particularly clever one. Weaver Green’s Temple rug, in a deep, earthy Kelp green, is hand-loomed to look and feel like wool – yet each one is woven from up to 5,400 recycled plastic bottles rescued from becoming landfill. It’s soft underfoot, machine-washable at 40°C, moth-proof, and happy to be dragged outside on a fine day. At £180 for the 150 x 90cm size with underlay, it earns its place twice over: it warms the space, and it spares a hard floor the slow scarring of castor wheels.
Roll out something greener at www.weavergreen.com.
Fizz on demand with CO2 YOU’s Bubbla
If, like me, you consume an indecent volume of sparkling water at the desk, especially during the extended heatwaves we have been enduring this summer, hauling bottles down the garden soon becomes a regular penance. CO2 YOU’s Bubbla is a neat way to avoid that faff. Built from durable metal in a smart Carbon Black, it turns tap water fizzy in seconds and comes with a BPA-free one-litre bottle.
The real appeal is the refill service behind it: you order a cylinder, they deliver it and collect the empty at the same time, so there’s no schlep to a retailer and no postage to return canisters. It’s refreshingly brand-agnostic, too, working with most major screw-in machines, so you’re not shackled to one maker’s ecosystem. The Bubbla is £120, halved for anyone joining the refill programme.
Get the bubbles going at www.co2you.com.
Work by day, watch by night with Soundcore’s Nebula P1
A garden office earns its keep at odd hours too, and Soundcore’s Nebula P1 is built for exactly that. Its two speakers detach completely and go wherever suits the room, delivering proper sound rather than the tinny effort most portable projectors manage, with up to 20 hours of playtime between them. The picture holds up well too: a crisp 1080p image scaling to a faintly absurd 180 inches, autofocusing and squaring itself off the moment you nudge it.
Running Google TV means it’s online out of the box, which is genuinely useful for work – the webinar you can’t face on a laptop screen, or the training video HR insists everyone watches by Friday, both look rather more bearable projected across a wall. One caveat: there’s no internal battery, so it wants mains power throughout. It’s £699.99 direct from Soundcore, but can be found a little cheaper elsewhere.
Roll the credits at www.soundcore.com.
Swing gently with Quatropi’s Bali egg chair
A hanging chair on the decking earns its keep for the 10 minutes between finishing one thing and starting the next, or perhaps reading a prep document. Quatropi’s Bali is built with British weather firmly in mind: its poly-bamboo weave has the look of the real thing but shrugs off rain, and once the cushions come in, the whole frame can live outside all year.
It arrives on its own sturdy steel stand, so there’s no drilling into a beam and no hunting for something to hang it from, and a weather cover is included. In an olive green that would nod nicely to the rug indoors, it’s now a discounted £560 from the Coventry family firm, which has been at this since 2004. The gentle swing is complimentary.
Take the weight off at www.quatropi.com.
Warm the terrace with Herschel’s Infrared Rio heater
The British calendar being what it is, a garden office that only works in July is half an office. Heat is what extends it – and rather than warm only the room, it’s worth making the terrace usable too, for the calls best taken pacing about in the fresh air. The 2.5kW Herschel Rio is made for exactly that: an outdoor-rated infrared heater with a handsome ceramic-glass front and a low-glare carbon lamp, it reaches working warmth in just 10 seconds and comes with a remote offering three heat settings. Weatherproofed to sit out year-round and wall- or ceiling-mounted, it’s from £599, and turns the step outside from a dash into a destination.
Feel the warmth at www.herscel-infrared.co.uk.
