3 years of home office: what I really lost working from home

Bureau Larmor — A word from the founder

There's a romantic version of working from home. No commute, coffee in your kitchen, cat on your lap. I believed it too. Then I understood what it was actually costing me.

I'm not talking about productivity in the broad sense. I'm talking about something more subtle: the quality of attention. That capacity to be fully present in what you're doing, without your environment constantly eroding it.

For three years, I worked from home. And for three years, I learned to live with interruptions I no longer even perceived as such — they had become the ordinary background noise of my days.

The hidden cost of domestic distractions

It's not just the noise. It's the blending of registers. The human brain isn't wired to constantly switch between modes — deep concentration, domestic management, being present for others, focused work. Every switch carries a cognitive cost.

Research in workplace neuroscience estimates it takes an average of 23 minutes to recover an equivalent level of concentration after an interruption. That figure stops being abstract when you start counting your daily interruptions.

These figures aren't unique to home working. But at home, interruptions have a particular quality: they come from the inside. So we respond to them without guilt, without even registering them as disruptions.

The boundary that disappears

There's a second effect, even less visible day to day: the gradual erasure of the boundary between professional and personal life. Not in an abstract sense. In a very concrete one.

When your office is in your living room, you never really leave the office. In the evenings, you walk past the screen. At weekends, you glance at your emails. At night, you think about the file you didn't finish — because physically, nothing marks the end of the working day.

It's not a matter of discipline. It's the absence of a physical closing signal. Without it, work spreads across your entire life.

The reverse is equally true: you never really come home either. Your house becomes, almost without meaning to, a space of permanent semi-work. A low-grade in-between state that drains you quietly.

What I chose — and why

I started looking for an external office not to escape the comfort of home, but to restore the integrity of both spaces. A home where you're truly at home. An office where you're truly at work.

What I found in Larmor-Plage was a way to inhabit this rhythm differently. A short walk in the morning. Sea air. A room where nothing reminds you of anything except the work. And the time to leave that becomes a clear, physical, welcome signal again.

The value the numbers don't show

You can calculate the tax benefit of renting to your own company. You can model an hourly rate, optimise a deduction. But it's harder to quantify the value of a working day that actually ends. Of a week with structure. Of a mind that has permission to recover.

These offices were designed for exactly that: quiet, well-lit, independent spaces in a place that's genuinely pleasant to be in. Not just to work better. Also to leave well.

Statistics cited in this article are drawn from academic research on attention and multitasking (including University of California, Irvine). They are given for illustrative purposes and may not reflect your personal situation.