VANCOUVER -- For many people, the workplace has shifted from team meetings in office towers to Zoom chats at kitchen tables. But instead of taking over a bedroom or using the living room to set up a home office, some Canadians are heading to the backyard.
Lindsay Quinn Levin, an interior designer in Port Moody, B.C., transformed a prefabricated structure in her backyard into a tiny home office.
“It became super hard to run a business from your dining room table when your entire family is home,” Levin told CTV National News.
With so much going on around her, the interior designer couldn’t focus on her projects.
“I needed something where I could go and take business calls and [...] just have a little bit of separation,” she explained.
Instead of letting her work suffer, she decided to create a space of her own – one carefully constructed by Brian Borsato, whose team builds prefabricated homes for Indigenous communities.
With the pandemic, Borsato’s usual work has dried up and so he decided to try something new.
“Instead of building houses… now we’re building smaller entities,” he told CTV National News. “It’s fully customized so if someone wanted one… they pick the size, the style, the interior, the exterior.”
According to the latest data from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, the number of people working from home increased to 5.4 million in January, surpassing the previous high of 5.1 million in April 2020.
With so many people working from home, the demand for backyard offices isn’t limited to B.C.; they’re now popping up across the country.
“It’s just another space that you can add instead of doing renovations to your house,” Borsato explained.
When it comes to cost, the price tag for these tiny offices ranges from about $8,000 to $14,000, depending on size and any other fixtures. But will the backyard office stick around once the pandemic is over? For Quinn Levin the answer is a definite yes.
“It can operate as a space for clients to come and see me and meet me in the space which is amazing,” she explained.
