Not enough room in the house to work or play? Then it's time to take-over the shed, says Eoin Lyons

Helen Cody: Fashion designer

Fashion designer Helen Cody lives in a pretty redbrick terrace along the canal in Portobello. She bought the house four years ago around the time she produced her first collection and needed a space from which to sketch, make patterns, do administration work and so on.

"There was a kind of half-shed/half-garage in the garden," says Helen Cody, "so I had a builder brick-in the opening where the garage doors were, fixed up the other walls, put in a decent window and door, and run electricity and heating out there."

Inside, she has installed MDF simple shelving from Atlantic Homecare: "I end up collecting so much fluff - lace, feathers, beads, buttons, ribbons . . ."

It's now all neatly housed in the studio-shed that has become attractive enough to allow Helen Cody hold appointments for couture commissions. There's one obvious advantage to the finished shed: "It's like working from home but there's a bit of distance, even though it takes me 30 seconds to get to work!"

Helen Cody points out that a shed or outdoor building similar to this is a good solution for people who "want to work from home but don't want to use the spare room".

Bob Lynn: Artist

Scottish artist Bob Lynn bought a house in Wicklow in the late 1980s.

"Moving to this rural area I thought I'd be able to come across an old farmhouse building nearby that I could use as a studio," he says.

That proved harder than he initially thought and, as a result, he had to build a shed at the end of his garden that would act as his workspace for his artistic endeavours.

Built from the proceeds of a successful solo exhibition, it is a timber structure with exterior cladding on a concrete foundation and has a shallow pitched roof.

It sits slightly raised from the ground.

"It's a bit removed from the house and as separate as you like," says Bob Lynn, "yet it's only 100 metres away from the back door."

Doing what he does, light is important in this building and there are almost as many windows as wall area.

Bob Lynn often paints on quite a large scale so, while the space in his studio/shed isn't enormous, it's big enough to also store many works.

Jason Ellis: Sculptor & conservator

Sculptor and conservator Jason Ellis lives in the city centre. There are two sides to his work; his own abstract stone-carved sculptures, and conserving old stone sculptures for institutions such as the National Gallery and National Museum.

"Stone carving is extremely dirty and dusty work, so there was no option but to do it outside the house," says Jason Ellis.

He worked from home in his last two houses but always in some kind of shed construction in the garden.

This shed was put together in his garden by Abwood Homes, a company in Wicklow which specialise in this kind of thing, doing everything from playhouses for children to bigger scale sheds often used as offices. It came flat-packed with Jason Ellis's custom specifications for window and door openings to suit the site.

Incidentally, the shed is called Shania (when Jason Ellis and his wife married they forgot the CD of music they wanted played and, by default, ended up with Shania Twain at the Registry office). The shed is basic enough but has three windows, a flat asphalt roof and has electricity. "It keeps work separate even though I'm at home," says Jason Ellis. "I'm contactable by cordless phone but my wife can work inside in peace."