Home Office In Swedish Is Hoffice

In Sweden, a new peer-to-peer platform enables people to come and work at someone’s home, or turn their own home into a co-working space.

Being a freelance worker can give you the feeling of unlimited freedom, but at some moments you can feel damn lonely sitting behind your laptop in that noisy coffee bar or an expensive co-working center. The Swedish peer-to-peer community Hoffice wants to overcome this problem by building an urban community of working nomads who work at people’s homes. People can register for free at hoffice.nu and offer their living room as a daytime co-working space, or book a spot at someone’s home office. Guests are asked to pay in the form of snacks, coffee or some food.

A map on the Hoffice homepage shows the existing Hoffice groups. There’s already groups in Taipei, Paris, Vienna and Canada, and of course, several of them in Sweden. The idea behind Hoffice shows some similarities with the Dutch initiative Huiskamerkantoor (Living Room Office), which we covered on this blog 1.5 years ago as well as in the Pop-Up City book, although Hoffice looks to be a more global platform.

Platforms like Hoffice are part of a bigger trend about the changing use and function of our homes. We don’t only live, eat and spend our free time there, but we slowly realize that our homes offer more possibilities than we traditionally believed. Hoffice shows that underused living rooms or big kitchens can be shared with others and used as co-working spaces. The sharing economy is on the rise, and it slowly changes the way we perceive public and private space.