The Great Office/ Playroom Debate

I Took The Room

I asked a simple question on Instagram last week. Nothing fancy. A poll. Office or playroom?

And F*CK ME, it exploded. Because it hit a nerve.

Hundreds of responses, voice notes, paragraphs in my DMs. Women I don’t know, typing fast. Women I do know, doing the same.

The question I posed was: should I keep this room as a playroom (

And I realised pretty quickly that this was so much deeper than interior design.

So here’s the setup…I built a house. I moved in last year. It was the most protracted and stressful “project” I’ve even undertaken. And it’s not finished (it will never be finished as people keep telling me). But the layout is…a challenge. There are 3 rooms downstairs - a sitting room and a kitchen and a large room that’s been acting as a playroom. All year I’ve been procrastinating and delaying and second-guessing and going backwards-and-forwards about converting it into an office. An office for me. My office. My studio. The room where the work happens, the work that pays the bills, the work I keep apologising for needing space to do.

And I’ve been stalling. For almost a year. On a room in my own house. I’m relegated to my bedroom, doing Zoom calls in my wardrobe.

When I asked the question on social media - office or playroom? - the responses split into camps immediately.

There was the practical camp: “Consider the kids’ ages. What will this room morph into in a few short years? Give yourself the office space you know you’ll want, without compromising on it”. Solid advice. Sensible. My own reflections reflected back.

There was the generational camp. Blunt, raw and aggrieved. Far from playrooms we were reared. None of us had a bloody playroom and we turned out fine. Which isn’t really about playrooms, is it? It’s about an entire aesthetic of parenting that arrived with Pinterest and stuck, this idea that children require curated, dedicated, specially designed spaces to have a proper childhood. An aesthetic and a belief I had fallen headfirst into. (Without the perfect playroom, I am robbing my children of their childhood…)

And then there was the honesty camp. The few who said what nobody wants to admit: “Making a playroom was the biggest waste of space in this house. It’s just another dumping ground. Same in everyone’s house”.

There it is - the playroom, for many families - is a room that exists in theory. In theory, children retreat there contentedly and neatly play with sorted, colour-coordinated and age-appropriate toys while you have a hot cup of tea. In practice, it’s a second attic with a foam mat and 10,000 pieces of lego. The kids are in the kitchen. They’re ALWAYS in the kitchen. Or my bedroom. Or my bathroom. Or anywhere I am frankly.

But the response that anchored me was from a friend: “My boys are 8 and 5. They mostly play football. They don’t like to be restricted to one room. But it is nice to have a specific place to put their shit”.

A specific place to put their shit.

That’s essentially the real function of a playroom. And I mean that kindly. It’s containment. Storage. The aspiration that childhood mess can be corralled into one room and the rest of the house can be something else.

Which raises the question: what is the office if not the same thing? A specific place to put your work. Your ambition. Your professional self. Contained. Not spilling into everything else. Not asking for more room than it’s allowed.

The 81% who wanted to subdivide - curtain down the middle, Kallax units as a dividing wall, two doors - I don’t think they were being indecisive. I think they were doing something very understandable. They were hedging. Keeping both stories alive. Because to say I’m taking this room as an office is to declare something. Out loud. That the money-maker matters. That the work matters. That you take up space.

Why does it feel like that? Bold? Greedy? Selfish?

Nobody said: take the room because you deserve it. They said: consider the kids’ ages. Consider what the room will become. The kids will be in the garden anyway. True, helpful, and also…cover. A permission slip written in practical language because the emotional one felt like too much to hand over.

I sat with this internal monologue for a long time. Longer than I should have. A whole year of walking past a door and wondering if I was allowed to want what was behind it.And then I made a decision -

I’m taking the room downstairs. My office. My studio. The bigger room. The better room.

The room with the good light and the two doors and the space to actually work in a way that isn’t a corner of a bedroom with my laptop on my knee. It will start as an office. It will grow into a workshop space; somewhere I can have meetings, deliver talks, host events. Maybe some of those events will be child-friendly?

And I’m converting the spare bedroom upstairs into the playroom. Not ideal. And not downstairs or close to the kitchen. But I can’t have it all. We can’t have it all.

The kids still have their space - and it will be theirs and I will do everything I can to make it as exciting and colourful and fun and practical as I want it to be for them.
And I will have mine. To grow the business, the vision, the opportunities. And to fund everything I want for the kids - the cool playroom yes, but also the holidays and the activities and the adventures. And actually - most importantly - I am investing in “presence”. To have a dedicated space that I can work from and a space that I can close the door on when “Working Mam” switches into just “Mam”.

Everyone will be fine.

And let me say this again with emphasis - because I don’t think I could have said it a year ago.: I TOOK THE BETTER ROOM.

I took the better room. I did, I took the better room. And I did it on purpose. Not because the logistics worked out that way. Because I decided my work was allowed to live in the best space in the house. That decision did not come easily, it did not come lightly, I was tied up in knots about it. But I listened to my gut. Nobody was going to hand me that permission. I had to write it myself.

Now if anyone knows anyone really good at building/ sourcing/ creating and/ or conceiving of really f*cking cool studio-workshop spaces (on a budget) GET IN TOUCH. Honestly, please do - or send me some links xx

For those interested, I’m running an online Personal Branding Webinar on Friday 24th July at 1pm. This is about the strategy behind building a personal brand as well as some key tactics to takeaway - all in a tight 60 mins.
Book your space here

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