A couple of years ago, almost to the day, I wrote here about how our old house is built on a closed concept, in contrast to the fascination with the open concept designs you see on all of the remodeling shows.

Our current national (and world) crisis now has a lot more people either working from home, or just staying at home. I wonder, particularly if this continues to go on for a while (as it looks like it may) if we won’t see a change in perspective surrounding both work and home design.

Our old house is built on that closed concept design in part because these homes were built with the expectation of multi-generational occupancy. It was anticipated that the children would continue to work the farm and live in the homestead, building their own family in the process. It would not have been unusual to see three generations living within the building and, in the case of our home, a worker or two as well. It’s notable that the four bedrooms in the front of the house are virtually identical in size - there is no "master" bedroom built into the design. The largest potential bedroom is at the back, in the workers area, and I’m quite certain it was built with the intention of bunking multiple people in the space.

These were work-from-home spaces by design. It’s true, of course, that the bulk of the work would have been done outside - tending the fields and livestock - but records need be kept and accounts need to be balanced. When you aren’t cramming a king-size bed into them, each bedroom has ample space for a small desk and chair. While there are communal living spaces, it’s clear the design of these homes was meant to allow people to separate themselves from others when the need for privacy arose.

For the subset of the population who are fortunate enough to be able to work from home I am certain there has been an adjustment period. If you have not worked remotely before, there are issues of both physical space and personal discipline to be worked out in order to be successful at it. You have to have a space where you can be away from others, and you have to set yourself to a schedule and not allow the distractions of your home to pull you away from that schedule. The other members of the household need to learn to live with and respect that schedule as well.

You might think "well, sure, that was true for a big old house like yours, but what about people who didn’t live on the farm?" If you live in a town or village that still has a downtown area, I’d encourage you to go and look at the buildings built from the 1850’s through the turn of the century. There’s a characteristic design to those storefronts that includes apartments on top.

Downtown Mendota

People often lived above the stores, restaurants, and taverns they operated. This is about as close to working from home as you can get without literally living _in_ the store.

What I wonder about all of this is whether, as this goes on and people adjust, we won’t see a developing preference for working from home among those who can do so. There are a host of advantages - not commuting means you regain that commute time. The average commute in the United States, one way, is 26.1 minutes, almost an hour per day, and rolling up over four hours per week (4.35, to be exact) for a full-time job. That’s four hours per week regained, 217.5 hours per year.

Commuting costs money as well as time. Car commuters - the majority of commuters - must buy fuel, and the travel back and forth puts wear and tear on the vehicle. Even a 10-mile commute one way puts 5000 miles a year on a vehicle. Commuting can also take a toll on your health and relationships.

With the savings in terms of time, health, and money, you can see where this might become attractive if people can get over that hurdle of work space and discipline in the home. The thing is, we can clear that hurdle - as described above, we’ve done this before. Frankly, although our era of commuting seems ubiquitous, it really is the outlier - we’ve only been doing these long commutes for a tiny slip of time in the grand scheme of things.

In fact, for quite some time the discipline of the work day was structured into our society. For those of us in Gen-X and older, many if not most of us grew up at a time when, as the saying goes, they "rolled up the sidewalks" at the end of the day. This is to say that, in smaller towns and villages at least, it was understood that nothing would be open downtown after 5 pm except for restaurants and taverns. Many places were not open on Saturdays and, when they were, it was always with limited hours. No one opened shop on Sunday - whether you were observant or not, it was understood to be a day of rest. This sounds inconvenient to our modern lives, to be sure, but it wasn’t all that big a deal then - you just planned ahead - and it is largely abrogated by online shopping now.

This is just a thought experiment of course - maybe things will just all go back exactly as they were when the pandemic has passed. But I wonder if we won’t see an impact on how people work, and how they want their homes laid out to support that change. I can just hear Drew and Jonathan now saying "what everyone wants nowadays is a closed concept design"...