Some sellers are putting properties on the market to be closer to the office, as companies shift back to in-person work and hybrid schedules
3 min
After three years of living in her dream home in a Texas community called Rocky Creek Ranch, Donna Rutter is giving it up to move closer to the accounting firm she bought in the nearby city of Fort Worth.
Rutter spent most of her 30-year career as a CPA for large firms in Dallas and Fort Worth. Even before Covid, she had a work style that allowed her some flexibility. She didn’t have a central office she went to every day, but she had clients she travelled to visit on site. That schedule allowed her to build a home in Rocky Creek, about 20 minutes from downtown Fort Worth.
Then the pandemic hit and she gave up travel and went fully remote. Now, with the pandemic-influenced lifestyle waning and the importance of being in the office growing, she has been drawn back into the workplace but for different reasons. In 2021, she bought her own firm, renamed Donna R Rutter CPA PC, and started working from her desk each week.
“Small businesses weren’t really set up to work remotely,” said Rutter, 59. “My clients want me in the office. They want to meet with me.”
The only problem, she said, was that her office is near central Fort Worth, making her commute about 45 minutes each way. She decided that is too long, and is moving closer to her new business. Her roughly 11-acre ranchette is now on the market for $1.75 million.
Rutter is just one of many homeowners making the decision to relocate closer to work.
According to a September report by Redfin, about 10% of home sellers in the U.S. are looking to move because of return-to-work policies, indicating that after more than three years of remote-work policies dominating behaviour in the housing market, the in-person, 9-to-5 lifestyle is picking up some steam. Average office attendance last week was 50.5% of the pre pandemic level in February 2020 across 10 major U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, according to Kastle, which tracks security-badge swipes into the buildings they secure.
In May and June, Redfin’s study surveyed more than 600 people across the country who were likely to sell and move within the next year, according to chief economist Daryl Fairweather. The findings follow more than a year of announcements from major corporations—including Apple, Walt Disney, Google and Tesla—calling remote employees back to the office.
In Seattle, local real-estate agent David Palmer of Redfin said that so far this year, he has received about 10% more inquiries than in 2022 from clients looking to relocate closer to the city because their jobs require a hybrid work schedule.
“I have a buyer who moved out of the city during the pandemic. He now works for Google and, long story short, he needs to commute three days a week and it’s about a two-hour commute each way,” he said. “So he’s actively looking to buy something.” Palmer’s client didn’t respond to a request for an interview.
Google has announced it will consider office attendance records in performance reviews, The Wall Street Journal reported in June. The company began calling employees back to the office a few days a week in April 2022.
Austin-based real-estate agent Matt Holm of Compass said that since Elon Musk called his employees back to the office, he has had several clients looking to move to the city to work for, or with, Tesla, where the company is headquartered. Last year, Musk told Tesla employees they are required to spend at least 40 hours a week in company offices, The Wall Street Journal reported. He sent the same message to employees of his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which also operates in Texas.
Finding affordable housing in Austin for some of the incoming workers can be tough, Holm said. Those who can’t, often settle down in nearby markets, such as San Antonio and Killeen, because they are cheaper, he said. In October, the median sale price in the Austin metro area was about $444,000, down 6.5% from October 2022, Redfin said.
But for the employees who can afford Austin prices, Holm added, the demand has been a welcome boost to the housing market, which has seen slowed sales due to rising interest rates. On average, homes in the Austin metro area are sitting on the market for 63 days, Redfin stated, up from 53 days during the same period in 2022.
The sentiment around relocating for in-person attendance is mixed, Palmer said, “I have some clients who don’t mind, others who are a bit peeved.”
Rutter and her husband, Steve Lewis, 61, built their roughly 4,000-square-foot ranchette in late 2019. They outfitted it with vaulted ceilings, a heated saltwater pool, a dog shower and an outdoor kitchen, among other features.
While the home they have bought closer to the city is just 20 minutes from her office, it is about 1,000 square feet smaller and sits on about a third of an acre. She declined to disclose the purchase price. “We don’t have as much room,” she said, but added she is excited for a change and a shorter commute.
The couple’s ranchette is garnering interest from potential buyers, according to their listing agent, John Giordano of Compass. Rocky Creek Ranch is a desirable area because of the steady demand for ranchettes and because of its proximity to downtown Fort Worth, he said, adding that homes there rarely come up for sale.
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
