Let There Be Sheds: The humble backyard storage solution is having a moment in the sun

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The backyard shed remains an ideal place to store a lawnmower and shovels, but a growing number of shedists are building structures that let them shut the door and recharge their batteries.

Voting for the 2017 U.K. Shed of the Year wrapped up a week ago. If this fact comes as a surprise to you, there are a few possible explanations: either you are not a shedist, or you are but this information did not penetrate your sanctum.

The latter scenario is more than a little ironic but hardly inconceivable. Sheds—the word derives from the Anglo-Saxon scead, meaning “shade” or place of retreat—are having a moment in the sun. In the U.K., where the shed-of-the-year contest—categories include “pub/entertainment,” “unique” and “workshop/studio”— serves as the culmination of National Shed Week, the humble structure is well established. Some estimates put the number of sheds in Britain as high as 12 million. Benjamin Britten’s music studio, which was housed in a potting shed, has been given a Grade 2 listing, which applies to particularly important buildings of “more than special interest”—and Roald Dahl’s “writing hut,” which he modelled on that of Dylan Thomas, is lovingly preserved in The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden. George Bernard Shaw had a shed that rotated so that it could always be illuminated by natural light.

Sheds are somewhat less integral to life in North America, but they are making inroads. She sheds, a kind of female equivalent to the man cave, are increasingly popular. In Calgary, Graham Sherman and Jeff Orr started Tool Shed Brewing in Sherman’s backyard shed. On a different scale, the Shed is a new performing-arts space in New York City set to open in 2019. Its chief feature is a telescoping shell that rests on rails. When not in use, the shell sits over the main structure. When it slides out, it encloses an adjoining 20,000-square-foot plaza, turning it into an indoor space. With a construction budget of US$435 million, the Shed is somewhat more grandiose than a typical backyard structure, but as a home for creative pursuits, it is in keeping with the British notion of sheds.

Locally, our chief shedist is Manny Blair. Blair and his wife, Sue, emigrated from England (leaving behind a perfectly good shed) in 2008. He has degrees in fine art and landscape design as well as a master’s in public art. She is a nurse and is working on a master’s degree in psychology. They are also the principals behind SMOL Design, based in De Winton. The name (it’s pronounced “small”) is an acronym derived from Sue, Manny, Oscar and Louis (the couple’s two sons). Blair also teaches courses in shed design, tiny-house planning and design, and abstract drawing through the Alberta College of Art + Design’s Continuing Education.

He’s also something of a shed philosopher. “Sheds are an odd structure—they’re selfish,” he says. “They are the antithesis of being communal. They are a single-occupancy structure. You can close the door. You can do whatever the hell you like.” This ability “to shut the door and recharge your batteries” also has mental-health benefits, Blair says. He adds that since the mid-1990s, the Australian health system has used so-called men’s sheds as a tool to combat social isolation. “You can drop in and do what you like—sit on your own, read the paper, do the crossword—keep yourself to yourself,” he says. “Or you can join in with others.” The concept of sheds created for mental-health purposes has now spread to other countries, including Ireland, the U.S. and Canada (menssheds.ca).

At SMOL Design these concerns are the purview of Sue. At ACAD, Blair touches on these issues, as well as shed history—”Silicon Valley was started in a shed, the jet engine was invented in a shed”—and philosophy.

Sheds are an odd structure—they're selfish

Manny Blair

His enthusiasm is obvious to his students. “If he was the mayor, everybody would be allowed to have a shed—whatever square footage they like. Just give him a chance,” says Nadiya Dubinina, who took Blair’s course last spring. Until such time as Blair becomes the mayor, however, certain rules apply. In Calgary, a structure with a footprint of less than 100 square feet does not require a building permit.

This space consideration functions as a guide for budding shedists in Blair’s course (which will next be offered in the fall). “Don’t look at the restrictions as an obstacle,” he says. “You can’t argue, but now you can get to the really fun stuff of making your idea work within the confines you’ve been given.”

Gino Tu, another former student, sums up Blair’s philosophy as “smaller can be better if it is better designed.” For his own part, Tu says “restrictions in the size of the shed force you to be creative. Designing for simplicity is not simple.”

Blair is not a fan of the term “she shed”—”I struggle with why there is this delineation—a she shed is a shed”—but he has noticed a gender divide among his students. In general, women want a shed in order to have some personal space. “They have a very specific reason for it to exist: art studios, library, yoga room, things like that,” Blair says. “Men come for more practical reasons—’I need to store a lawnmower.'”

Dubinina’s backyard shed has taken a back seat to an ongoing home renovation, but her goals for taking the course were in line with Blair’s assessment. She wanted to build a combination tool shed and summer room. “My husband is a big fan of music, and I’m not so much—he could listen all day; for me it’s like two hours max,” she says. “So my idea was: You will go there, listen to the music at whatever volume you would like and it won’t bother me and it won’t bother the neighbours.”

Likewise, Erik Huizing took the course for reasons that harmonize with Blair’s take on things. “The idea of having a refuge from the world and a place just to yourself seems pretty neat,” he says, “but for me it was more about having a place to put stuff.”

Huizing built his shed last summer, working on it in the evenings and on weekends (when the exceptionally rainy weather permitted). It has a footprint of 80 square feet and serves as both storage and a greenhouse. The front wall, with its two large windows, faces south and is angled back to better collect sunlight in late winter and early spring. “I’m going to get the pumpkins off to an early start,” Huizing said when we met at the beginning of April. The shed sits at the rear of his yard beside two raised garden beds. Rain barrels tucked out of sight at the rear of the shed collect the water running off the sloped roof.

Although he has finished construction, Huizing is nowhere near completing the project. “I’ve got big plans for the inside,” he says. Huizing is a software developer at SMART Technologies and his future plans draw on his skills. “I got one of those Arduino kits—it’s like a mini-computer, a very bare-bones processor board,” he says. “There are thousands of sensors for it, so I can hook up temperature sensors and figure out the temperature differential between outside and inside, the ceiling and floor, and even figure out how much heat I’m losing. Eventually, it’ll even open up the valves on the rain barrels.”

These plans are a good illustration of what Blair cites as another shed virtue. Referring to the author Daniel Pink’s notion that we live in an age of abundance, Blair says “we want for nothing, but it’s all generic. It’s all homogenous.” In contrast, he adds, “a shed is custom. It has to be because you’re designing it for an individual person and everyone’s different.”

The shed, then, not only serves a specific purpose; it’s also an expression of its owner’s personality. Consider the structure Blair built on his De Winton acreage. The Bothy, as Blair calls it, features curved walls and a domed roof bristling with some 1,500 spikes, each one hand-cut and bevelled. “It seemed like a really good idea at the time,” Blair jokes, noting that he “stole” the idea from Thomas Heatherwick’s Seed Cathedral, which was the British Pavilion at Shanghai World Expo 2010.

At the moment, the Bothy serves as a shelter for his kids while they wait for the school bus. (A solar panel on the roof powers a motion-sensor light to discourage critters from taking up residence.) When his kids finish high school—they’re 13 and 14 currently—Blair has plans for the shelter. “It’s not going to sit there like a folly,” he says. “I’ve built it so it can be relocated onsite and retrofitted into a small shed—a library and writing room.”

As an expression of personality, the repurposed shed will serve to confirm Blair’s creativity, but “spiky” or “prickly” seem like the wrong adjectives. It’s more accurate to think of both the Bothy and the man as multi-faceted.