A home office in a space that would normally be a closet or a laundry room has a happy name - the Cloffice. How big is a cloffice, or perhaps more importantly, how small can a cloffice be to function?
It can be so tiny as to be a desk where the chair sits outside the space - 22 go 24 inches deep. It would be 44 to 48 inches deep if your chair sits in it. The width would be 3 to 4 feet wide. In the past, we called these nooks. The word is still used along with alcoves and recesses. When there is a nook involved, the term is nook cloffice. The next size up is a deep reach-in or small-walk-in would be 4 to 6 feet wide and 4 to 7 feet deep. A large walk-in would be 7 by 7 feet or larger. That's bigger than the 'standard' closet which is considered to be 3 to 6 feet wide and 24 inches in depth.
So the corner office in our house would be considered large. However it isn't a converted closet. It was a bedroom, but could only fit a single bed, and not a double or queen size bed. It isn't much larger than the standard walk-in closet size of 10 feet by 10 feet. And considering trends, it might have been converted into a walk-in closet by a different owner. So many options these days - we really enjoy being creative in our home spaces.
I typically come to a topic a few years late. Today's inspiration was a Globe and Mail article where the pictures of the cloffices were of rooms so large I couldn't image these were once closets. I began to wonder if I knew what size closets are today. Our house is 1960s, back when closets were small things.
So I looked for some history and see a lot of articles on the cloffice from 2021 - the cloffice was a pandemic trend. And with condos in Toronto being 500 to 900 square feet, a cloffice would be a normal thing. Articles confirm that the trend became standard in the 2010s and exploded with COVID, where home offices absolutely had to happen.
Widen the search and you will find yourself in the garden! There are articles that show how to convert the garden shed into a shed office, (maybe a shedfice or a garfice). There are way more pictures of turning garden sheds into offices. Perhaps this is more novel and appealing as a story. The Home Depot is full of ideas on this topic. Take a 7 by 7 foot Rubbermaid storage shed, and turn it into a she shed kind of office - just steps outside the back door of your home. Most of these how-to articles were published in 2021 during COVID, something to keep you busy during those strange times. No heating or ventilation is mentioned in the articles, so I guess they thought COVID would be gone by winter.
But it turns out that standalone garden offices and backyard office pods are trending in 2026. Biophilic and nature-connected designs, multifunction layouts with electrical and climate control for year-round. Palram and Summerwood are noted companies that advertise. The price tag? Around $20,000 for the starter size. I bet the one pictured with the grand piano costs a fit more than that. Isn't that perfect - a grand piano out in the open with no climate-control. Tune that one each week, and then throw it out in no time when it's warped.
Isn't this picture delightful for the topic - a dog house converted to a dog shed. This is at Beth Powell's garden in Canboro. Sophie might want one, but Millie is not so interested.
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