There's No Office Like Home

A look at how four entrepreneurs designed unique home offices to meet their specific needs, personal tastes, styles of work and physical limitations.

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State of the Art

Work how you want, when you want, and where you want. Here's how four entrepreneurs built the offices of their dreams

Pete Nelson: A room with a view
Great home offices grow out of the same kind of foresight that great entrepreneurial companies do. They begin with people who can identify their own needs both as workers and as individuals. They develop with conscientious planning. And they flourish when their designers know how to adapt available resources to their exact specifications--investigations that may not end until an entirely unexpected solution has been invented. Great home offices, like great small companies, succeed because of fearless tinkering and an eye toward the future.

These days, more and more businesspeople are setting up shop at home. Some are telecommuters, while others have gone the route of moonlighting or full-time self-employment. Many have recognized that the kitchen table isn't always the best place to open a briefcase or a laptop and have rearranged the corners of their bedrooms, attics, and basements to make space for both routine and after-hours operations. According to a 1997 study conducted by the Emerging Technologies Research Group of FIND/SVP, 52 million Americans currently work at home in some capacity, and more than 11 million telecommute from a home office at least one day per month. It's a trend that shows no signs of abating.

The three home offices profiled here are triumphs of both business function and personal expression. They are as varied as the entrepreneurs who use them. These are offices that are a pleasure to come home to.

Bill Gates isn't the only maverick who's built a dream house outside Seattle. Pete Nelson has one with breathtaking views. It is shingled in cedar and radiant with windows. It is easy to get to, and a marvelous retreat.

It is Pete Nelson's home office. And it floats 10 feet up in a stand of 70-year-old Douglas firs.

Pete Nelson, a carpenter and general contractor, has been running his $600,000 P.J. Playhouse Inc. out of this space since 1995. The five-year-old company designs and constructs singlefamily homes in "Northwest shingle style," an idiosyncratic architectural blend of New England shingle style, Greek Revival, and Northwest contemporary elements. But even closer to Nelson's heart--and the basis for his growing fame--is his presidency of the World Treehouse Association. Nelson and his wife, Judy, are the fountainhead of a surprising revival in these high-wired days: grown men and women who dream about acting the part of the Swiss Family Robinson, do-it-yourselfers hammering together planks and beams. Together they run the World Treehouse Association's commercial arm, Nelson's Treehouse Supply, a seven-month-old outfit that offers design-consulting and building services for tree houses being constructed as far away as Japan, and that last year organized the association's first international conference. Judy manages the association's Web site, with the help of a friend, carpenter Jake Jacob, and is in the process of developing tree-house-related gift items such as T-shirts, postcards, and calendars to sell through Nelson's Treehouse Supply. The company also distributes Pete's two books, the first of which has been a surprising best-seller, with more than 70,000 copies in print.

When Nelson published his first book, Treehouses: The Art and Craft of Living Out on a Limb, in 1994, he didn't have a tree house to call his own--a fact he confesses in his 1997 sequel, Home Tree Home: Principles of Treehouse Construction and Other Tall Tales. After all, his kids were toddlers, and Judy wasn't enthusiastic about living that far off the ground. But there was a more compelling reason: the right trees just had not come along. Sure, Nelson had built a tree house in Colorado Springs, Colo., when he and Judy were college students, but once they moved to Seattle, the only appropriate trees were in the park next door. He had to wait until they found the five-acre setting that they currently inhabit in the modest suburb of Fall City, about a half-hour ride from Seattle. They had enough money to buy the land but not enough for a house, so they moved into a mobile home. And Pete's office went into the air. It works beautifully as an office, he says, and at the same time is a marketing tool for his consulting business: he uses it as a prototype to show to prospective clients.

Nelson's insulated 15-by-15-foot cabin in the sky is an appealing shingle style with dark green trim. Firs standing 125 to 175 feet anchor each corner. A stairway with rope banisters delivers visitors to the front door. "Before I built my office, I was a purist and I would have insisted on a ladder, maybe even a rope ladder," Nelson says. "But ladders are really for kids' tree houses. The stair system has many benefits--especially when you're marching 17-inch computer monitors and other equipment up and down. This way, it's not a hassle to bring up a briefcase every day."

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