Pattern overview

Block Plan

passage + side entrance

Workhome group:

Passage

Categories:

Office/Study, Workshop/Studio, Domestic facilities, Private, Equal Status, Live-with, No employees, Front and side, Medium

Space is borrowed from the ground floor of the left-hand house and paid back at first floor level. There is a small, private patio garden for each house and a common yard beyond, shared by two ‘workboxes’ with their own toilets and kitchenettes. In this version, one of the workboxes is for a solitary worker, perhaps a writer or teleworker, the other is for a hairdresser or consultant seeing clients on an appointment basis. The entrance to the passageway would be controlled by a video entry phone.

The controlled access, shared yard is an intermediate space between the fully public street and the fully private home. The arrangement offers opportunities for co-operation between home-based workers, either on a professional or purely social basis. In larger developments a workhome cluster would be formed in which facilities could be shared and social isolation prevented. Nineteenth century watchmakers’ houses in Coventry are an important precedent for such a cluster. The bringing together of the work elements of the plan is balanced by an increased separation between home and work. This means, for example, that it would be easier to separate child-related from work-related activities.