Tips for Working from Home

By: Murray Bancroft

My job is a little unusual. As a food stylist and menu developer, I cook a lot. One week I’m developing Westernized Filipino sauces for a food manufacturer, another I’m building dairy-free pizzas and ice cream for a Japanese-owned firm.

In my 30-plus year career, I have not once “gone to the office”. Unless you mean my kitchen. And recently that has been a benefit as we have all been “working from home” during this health crisis.

While I’ve designed a couple of kitchens from scratch, the one in our Vancouver rental house came with the place. Being from the 1920s, when no one “hung out” in the kitchen, it’s a small-ish galley-style space. But you know what? I kind of like it. There’s no one drinking wine at the massive kitchen island to distract me when I am trying to deglaze, and it’s three steps from the fridge to the stove to the sink. Real chef’s kitchens are like that too, designed for maximum efficiency not maximum kitchen parties. I use our dining room table, with its beautiful natural light, for photoshoots, and I catch up on emails in the sunroom.

Since I can write off 25 percent of my rent as a home office, it’s allowed us to rent a bigger place in a nicer neighbourhood than we might have. I’ve got room for two freezers, and the all-important wine fridge (natural winemaking, under the Birch Block label, being my other job). Our back yard is large enough that I built a large potager, but we seem to have a high proportion of vegetarian racoons in this area. I’ve discovered they won’t go into planted pots for whatever reason (laziness?) so I grow mint, basil, rosemary and thyme for flavour and garnishes. I tried strawberries too, but our dog Princeton favoured those.

I’m glad we sold our house and decided to rent in the city when we did 9 years ago. It’s freed up time and finances for us to travel, grow a vineyard, and make wine—and a place to gather with friends and family to enjoy the fruits of our labour.