As more people work at home, design of home workspaces is evolving to fit the times -- and spaces

It was not so long ago, Neal Zimmerman recalls, that the term home office meant something very different from what it does today.

In the early '90s, when Zimmerman, a prominent workplace architect in West Hartford, Conn., started designing residential work spaces, most people thought "home office" meant the headquarters of a company. Back then, the very idea of working at home had a certain stigma, except in a few vocations like freelance writing. In the popular imagination, he said, "people who worked from home were usually laid off or couldn't hold down a job, or were peripheral to the work force."

But by 2006, according to data collected by the Dieringer Research Group, a marketing research company in Brookfield, Wis., more than 28 million Americans were working from home at least part time -- an increase of 10 percent from just the year before, and 40 percent from 2002. The American Home Furnishings Alliance reports that seven in 10 Americans now have offices or designated workstations in their homes, a 112 percent increase since 2000. And a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders found that home offices ranked as the fourth most important feature in a new upscale home, just ahead of security.

In addition to new technologies that have enabled the telecommuting revolution, Marilyn Zelinsky-Syarto, a writer specializing in workplace design, pointed to an increase in design options as part of the reason for the change.

"Years ago," said Zelinsky-Syarto, who has her own home office in Fairfield, Conn., "it was Staples or a high-end furniture store with ridiculously large or tiny writing desks that did not fit technology. Nothing in between."

"But now," she added, "we have carpenters creating custom built-ins in home office spaces and filling them with furniture from a variety of sources. Plus, there are a whole heck of a lot more affordable interior designers willing to take on one room at a time."

There are also several distinct needs and desires being expressed by their clients. As more Americans come to see home offices as central to their lives, those offices say more about them as individuals, cut each also speaks to what decorators, architects and furniture manufacturers describe as a major aspect of the growing market for home offices, and of the ways millions of Americans are living and working at home.

Room of his own

The American fascination with luxury in recent years has given rise to what Zelinsky-Syarto called the "status symbol office," one "that shows everyone how hard you worked to pay for that million-dollar-plus house." Among men in particular, the demand has increased for touches of grandeur from the turn of the last century, like intricate wood paneling and antique partners' desks.

Few men, though, could hope to compete with the walnut-paneled office that Alexander Cappello, the founder, chairman and chief executive of the Cappello Capital Corp., a merchant bank, has filled with guns, swords, animal heads and other accouterments of masculinity.

"My friend's wife calls it the testosterone room," said Cappello, who decorated the two-story 40-by-60-foot room in his Brentwood house himself. "It's got all the things I'm passionate about."

The office, which Cappello said cost $300,000 to $350,000, holds three dozen antique chess sets, several hundred globes, 1,800 handmade canes from around the world and thousands of antique books. A billiard table from 1849 and a large partners' desk anchor opposite ends of the room, and 19th-century military and animal paintings adorn the walls, along with two big plasma screens, "for watching football games with my buddies," he said.

The desire for such masculine space isn't limited to multimillionaires, said Eric Heim, a senior designer and the store manager at Manhattan Cabinet-ry. "It's every man's dream," he said. "They can hang out there, and no one bothers them."

Several manufacturers have introduced office furniture that responds to this seemingly universal desire. Clarendon, a line of 17th-century English-style wall units from Hooker Furniture, wraps around a room, creating a built-in look with elaborate moldings and traditional hardware. The set retails for $20,000, with options including a matching desk and chair, a computer hutch, a bookcase, a credenza, an entertainment center large enough for a 60-inch flat-screen television, and a bar cabinet.

More affordable options include Maitland-Smith's enormous Black Angus and cowhide partners' desk (about $9,000), which is so big that two people can use it facing each other, with their own kneeholes, and Pottery Barn's new Montego roll-top desk ($1,999).

Women have stuff, too

"For many years the only space a woman had to work in was shared with the rest of the family, at the end of the kitchen counter or in a guest bedroom," said popular interior designer Christopher Lowell. "She never had a place where she could put her stuff out and leave her stuff out."

That was the case for Christine Jowers, the founder of a dance production company in Manhattan, who was accustomed to holding meetings in her bedroom or kitchen. "The dance field is really laid back," she said. "But still, it was just weird."

So when Jowers and her husband, Robert Friedman, moved to an apartment near the Bowery in June, she hired architect Bill Suk to add a room on the rooftop that she could devote entirely to work, away from the high-traffic areas used by her sons, ages 5 and 9.

The other key to making the space suitable for work -- was adequate storage: She has a custom filing cabinet where she can keep her writings, and bookshelves for her large library of dance books. She added a desk bought at an antiques store 10 years ago and plastic drawers from National Wholesale Liquidators. The total cost of the project, including building permits, was just over $30,000, she said.

Some retailers are now responding to women's need for dedicated home office space by offering products specifically geared toward their requirements. Office Depot, recognizing that more than half its customers are women and that businesses owned by women were growing twice as fast in number as others, has added several new lines of furniture, including the Christopher Lowell Collection, which has sold so well that the company is now developing furniture sized and scaled for women under its own brand name, said Richard Diamond, an Office Depot vice president.

High-tech and hidden

The explosion of digital technologies has led to a new set of challenges for designers trying to create comfortable, uncluttered work spaces, particularly for clients whose jobs -- or predilections -- involve the use of multiple devices. Lee Unkrich, who works at Pixar Animation Studios, uses a Mac Pro computer with two monitors at his home office in Marin, along with sundry digital media players, cameras and scanners, an Epson photo printer and a control panel that lets him use his Crestron home automation system to adjust the heat, air-conditioning, lighting and security system from anywhere inside or outside the house.

"When I'm working, I need to have a very clear mind. I can't have chaos around me," he said. To create a streamlined work space, Unkrich hired interior designer Mark Dutka, who came up with what he called a partial-perimeter solution: Two-thirds of the room is dedicated to Unkrich's work space, so he can reach almost everything he needs without getting up; the rest functions as a den.

The desk and cabinets are made of makore, an exotic wood that Unkrich liked for its warmth and its interesting grain. They hide pullout shelves that hold an array of audio and visual components, and a wire management trough under the desk. Aware that Unkrich would probably update his gear frequently, Dutka said he made sure the storage wasn't so component-specific that it couldn't accommodate whatever sizes or shapes came next.

To give the space visual interest, an opposing wall and a desk extension were covered with eucalyptus, which is much lighter than makore and has pronounced striations. The final touches included a couch where Unkrich's wife, Laura Century, could sit and read, and shelves on the wall next to the desk with two rolling stools their three children, age 3, 8 and 10, can pull over when Unkrich is in need of a consultation.

For Unkrich, the best part of the room -- which he said cost under six figures -- is not what you see, but what you don't. "You walk into the room, and you don't see anything except the computer monitors."