Edwin Elliott Jr. had a 100 year-old home and a need for a home office. So he built one, tucked beneath the house, slightly below grade level. He can now do his work while watching his three children play in the back yard.
 
The fact that he's an architect made the project a little easier than it may have been for most homeowners. But Elliott said "there's always a way" to make even an antique home suitable for the 21st century.
 
Elliott said more of his residential clients are asking for home offices. He said he has several clients who needed remote sites for their main offices. from which they could work a few days a week. Another has three offices: one in her company's out-of-state headquarters, another at her home and a third at a farm she owns.
 
The key to adding a home office to an existing property is making it private enough to accomplish the work that's needed and still be a part of the house. Typically, that means creating a separate entrance as well as sufficient insulation to keep noise from interfering with concentration. Elliott said he made a slight miscalculation when designing his own office. "I underestimated how much noise would travel through the floor," he explained.  He said he can deal with the muffled sound of the TV and piano. What bothers him is “when someone drops something," he said. That's something he now takes into consideration when design-ing other home offices.

Some homeowners are simply converting unused bedrooms to offices. Others are creating them in specially designed year-round sun rooms. According to Four Seasons Sunrooms, increasing numbers of home-based workers find a sunny space a great workplace.
 
The sunrooms can be specially designed to accommodate a full-range of office equipment, from computers to multi-line telephone systems. The rooms are a relatively inexpensive source of space, home remodelers say.
 
Using sun rooms for home offices is one of the latest trends in home remodeling. Typically, trends in remodeling foreshadow trends that will be popular in houses in the coming decade, according to the building industry.
 
-Noreen Seebacher