The notion that a home should be a work-free retreat only began in the second half of the 19th century, explains Elizabeth Patton in her new book, Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office. Storekeepers, self-employed artisans, teachers, clergymen, and funeral parlor owners, for instance, continued to live where they worked, as London Metropolitan University’s Workhome Design Guide outlines. But home-based work didn’t entirely cease during this period.

A throng of workers, mostly male, clocked-in at a central location to work with machinery and assembly lines. The Industrial Revolution shifted the locus of economic activity from the home to factories in Europe and America. In the US, middle-class homes typically had a chamber (a.k.a “the den” or a “gentleman’s study”) close to the front door where the master of the house received clients. Farmers lived with their animals in a single-story room called the “longhouse” and merchants often lived above their workshops and storefronts. For centuries, English “workhouses” combined a workshop with the family’s living quarters. Before the Industrial Revolution, the template for residential architecture included a space for doing business. Working from home is a revival of an old idea.

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