Great ideas for outdoor rooms

Reinvent your yard with a new deck, patio, cottage, dining room, or curl-up space

19 favorite garden cottages and sheds

Creative ideas for backyard retreats, detached home offices, and reinvented sheds

1 of 20

View all

Great ideas for backyard cottages and sheds

Backyard home office

Martha Mendoza’s days are filled with deadlines, after-school commitments, and other pressures. Yet the celebrated journalist, teacher, wife, and mother―who won a Pulitzer Prize at age 33 for an investigative series on the Korean War―leads a surprisingly balanced life.

Her secret? This tiny home office, housed in a converted potting shed in her Santa Cruz, California, backyard. Here she can steal away from her domestic responsibilities to write, study, and pursue breaking news stories for the Associated Press. "Being detached from the house is key."

Read more about this backyard office