Working from home sounds like the dream set up – an extra hour in bed, lunch no further than your own fridge away, even no need to get dressed if you don’t feel like it…

But while it sounds like the dream scenario, working at home can very quickly become oppressive, if there’s no way you can escape all the reminders of what you should have got done that week – when all you want to do is put your feet up on Friday night and veg out in front of Netflix.

Even if you have a nominated work room within your house, just a glimpse of it as you walk past the open door with your hard-earned gin and tonic in your hand can put a knot in your stomach for the whole evening. The perfect solution is to work at home – but not at home, by creating a separate working space in your garden.

You might have an old wooden building you can convert, as Kent-based photographer Mel Smith did with a former milking parlour, which still looks bucolically quaint from the outside, but is now a high-tech photography studio within.

If you don’t happen to have an old farm building lying around, you can commission your own wooden building – with far less planning permission stress than required for a full new-build (subject to the specific setting of each project).

Jeweller Alice Robson had her husband James (conveniently an architect) design her a studio inspired by a traditional shepherd’s hut, with the advantage that she could specify exactly the kind of layout she needed for her work.

By engaging a company specializing in wooden buildings, you can achieve exactly such a bespoke space, with all the hard work done for you – leaving your energies intact for your own enterprises. And on Friday evening you can lock the door and forget about it until Monday…

Photographic studio

Alice Robson's studio

The shepherd's hut-inspired workspace

• words: Isobel Mackay

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