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After visiting IIDEX, the big commercial interior show in Toronto, I noted, with tongue in cheek, that the office of the future was looking more and more like a collection of tiny homes. Lo and behold, the very next day I learn that Minim, who makes a very elegant tiny home, is now making a tiny office on wheels.
We have shown a lot of garden shed offices, mostly from Alex Johnson’s UK site Shedworking, as they are very popular there, where most houses do not have basements or too many spare bedrooms but do have sheds where the outhouses used to be. Most of them are built by owners or sold by shed companies, and few of them are on chassis- they are sheds, not trailers. But putting them on wheels has advantages.
After visiting IIDEX, the big commercial interior show in Toronto, I noted, with tongue in cheek, that the office of the future was looking more and more like a collection of tiny homes. Lo and behold, the very next day I learn that Minim, who makes a very elegant tiny home, is now making a tiny office on wheels.
© Minim
We have shown a lot of garden shed offices, mostly from Alex Johnson’s UK site Shedworking, as they are very popular there, where most houses do not have basements or too many spare bedrooms but do have sheds where the outhouses used to be. Most of them are built by owners or sold by shed companies, and few of them are on chassis- they are sheds, not trailers. But putting them on wheels has advantages.
Minim is actually leasing their units, starting at $ 675 per month for an open unit without furnishing and connected to the grid, going up to $ 925 per month for a fully furnished office (nicely furnished too) with solar panels, batteries and inverters for a fully off-grid office. This is very reasonable, when you consider that in Washington DC (where they are leasing the units) a private office at WeWork, a co-working space, rents a private office for one person for $ 730 per month for one person, $ 1360 for two. (although WeWork has WiFi) Leasing is also more tax-friendly than buying as it can be totally expensed against income.
Leasing of office trailers is fairly common in business and industry, particularly for construction sites, but those are usually pretty utilitarian and are often shipping container based. The Minim version is a bit smaller at 80 square feet (8’6’’ x 12’ exterior dimensions) but a lot more attractive and sized so that it could fit in a driveway or a backyard without bringing out the NIMBYs- it is really just a small trailer.
For those who do not have the room or the mindset to work from home and need a place to get away (and hate working in coffee shops), this might be an interesting option. And my vision of future of the office being a collection of tiny homes was perhaps prescient.