Out of Office: A Short History of Working Away

From portable writing desks to laptops on the terrace, the long-standing dream of working somewhere else.

The window is open. The sea breeze drifts in, carrying the scent of salt. In the background, waves gently break against the shore. On the table sit a laptop, a notebook and a drink that’s already gone warm. An automatic reply informs the world that we’re “out of office.” It’s not exactly a lie. Our work has simply relocated to a place with a better view. A few grains of sand have already found their way beneath the space bar, a gentle reminder from summer of who’s really in charge.

It feels like the quintessential image of our times: an era in which we’re never quite allowed to stop working, not even on holiday. O tempora, o mores!, Cicero might have said. And yet, the desire to work somewhere else is much older than Wi-Fi. For centuries, people have searched for ways to fit everything needed to think, write and correspond with distant colleagues into a single portable object. Long before we started carrying our offices with us, we had already taught the desk how to travel.

When the Office Fit Inside a Box

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, portable writing desks travelled with explorers, military officers and men of letters. Closed, they looked like enigmatic wooden boxes; opened, they revealed a sloping leather writing surface with neatly arranged compartments for paper, pens and inkwells. The writing slope once owned by the English poet William Cowper, dating from around 1790 and now housed at the Cowper & Newton Museum in Olney, is an elegant example of the type. Thomas Jefferson’s, however, would make history. In 1776, he drafted the first version of the Declaration of Independence on a portable mahogany writing desk that he designed himself and had built by cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph. Jefferson continued to use it for nearly fifty years. In 1825, he gave the desk as a wedding present to his grandson-in-law after the original gift had been lost at sea. The replacement turned out to be the very box on which The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America had first been written. The Coolidge family later donated it to the U.S. government in 1880. It was, in many ways, the wooden ancestor of today’s laptop: always ready to open, yet blissfully free of software updates and relentless notifications. Messages still arrived, of course—but on horseback, at a pace that now feels almost luxurious.

The Desk Gets a Handle

As the portable office evolved, it became smaller and considerably noisier.

Introduced in 1912, the Corona 3 portable typewriter was compact, lightweight thanks to its aluminium construction, and cleverly designed with a folding carriage that locked over the keyboard, allowing it to fit neatly into its carrying case. Tough and remarkably portable, it travelled with war correspondents during the First World War and soon became a favourite of journalists and writers. Ernest Hemingway used a Corona 3 during his early years in Europe in the 1920s, long before anyone had coined the term remote work. In 1920, Remington brought the idea to a broader audience with the Portable No. 1, the first portable typewriter with a four-row keyboard. From that moment on, the writing desk ceased to be a stately piece of furniture and became something that could sit on the desk of a boarding house room, the table of a restaurant or the veranda of a café—provided fellow patrons were willing to tolerate the rhythmic clatter of the keys. By 1969, portability had shed even its office identity. Olivetti’s Valentine, designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King and housed in a bright red ABS shell, transformed the typewriter into a pop icon. It was aimed at a younger generation and a more mobile way of life. Sottsass famously described it as “the ballpoint pen of typewriters,” while the advertising campaign placed it everywhere but the office: in an aeroplane cabin, on a bed, even at a fish market. The Valentine wasn’t simply about writing anywhere, it suggested that doing so could be stylish, too.

The Desk Reaches Orbit

The arrival of the computer pushed the idea of the portable office to its logical extreme. Launched in 1981, the Osborne 1 was the first mass-produced portable computer. It weighed around 11 kilograms and was about as easy to carry as a suitcase full of encyclopedias. Portable, yes—but only by the standards of the early 1980s. A year later came the GRiD Compass, designed by Bill Moggridge. Its pioneering clamshell design with the screen folding neatly over the keyboard was patented by GRiD and would go on to become the defining form of the modern laptop. The Compass also found its way beyond the office: NASA used it aboard the Space Shuttle, the portable office had officially left the building and reached orbit.

Out of Office, Still Online

Today, a workspace can appear almost anywhere: a beach house, an airport lounge, a train carriage, a shaded terrace. What could be better? Except that working by the sea is still, unmistakably, work. The view may lift your spirits, but it has never fixed a presentation or shortened a video call. And a beach in the background has yet to stop someone from saying, “Before we wrap up, there’s just one last thing…” A phrase that, as everyone knows, has a curious habit of expanding far beyond its promise.

Which leaves the more uncomfortable question: if work can happen anywhere, where does it actually end? All it takes is a smartphone notification for an aperitivo to become, in an instant, a temporary office. Today’s out of office message is a small masterpiece of ambiguity. It announces our absence while explaining exactly when we’ll reply, who to contact instead and, should anything be urgent, how to reach us anyway. We may be away, but we’re rarely unavailable.

In an age of permanent connectivity, truly switching off has become something of a luxury. Perhaps that’s why August still holds a certain quiet power. The languid heat grants us, almost without asking, what we seldom allow ourselves: a few unhurried hours in which doing nothing becomes not an indulgence, but an art.