In Design Rewind, AD looks back at the people, places, and things that defined 2025, from the end of working from home to the best place to build a home (hint: It’s not on a lot). Here’s what we saw in the year’s rearview mirror.
We are gathered here today to remember a fleeting but formative friend: working from home. For me and my Condé Nast colleagues, she was born on March 11, 2020. It was a Wednesday.
She came into this world under tumultuous circumstances—and the story of her early life has been told many times over, so I’ll spare you a long recap. What I will say is that I remember it like it was yesterday.
The night before she arrived, I watched the finale of The Bachelor with friends at a bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Peter Weber proposed to Hannah Ann Sluss only to turn around and leave her for his runner-up, Madison Prewett, in a dramatic twist. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it would come to be the clearest representation of a crucial juncture in time for me and my friends. “The last time things felt normal was watching the Bachelor finale that night,” we’d say in the months to come. Because the very next day, the news came by email: Someone at the company has COVID-19. Stay home.
Our office wasn’t the only one to change that day: March 11 was also when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. In the days and weeks that followed, other desk workers around the country also signed on from their laptops at home as we all waited to see what would happen.
Remote work cried miserably when she was young. Personally, I found putting up with her to be a bit trying during those first weeks, when emotions were high and fear was everywhere, and I know I’m not alone. But like any good relationship, our bond strengthened as we got to know each other better, and I soon realized that she would bring me treasures I could only have dreamed of during the years I spent with my shoulders weighed down by heavy totes, schlepping from the office to happy hour and the gym, five days a week, over and over again.
For the first time in his little life, my roommate’s Chihuahua, Dewey, went out to stretch his tiny legs during lunchtime. And speaking of lunchtime, eating a freshly cooked meal during it suddenly became not only possible, but normal. Dinners, too, got better, healthier, with the ability to take chicken out of the freezer day-of, wash and prep veggies while listening in on a meeting, or quickly run to the store for an ingredient. Instead of just a walk to the bathroom, a break between editing assignments now had the potential to be a productive task, like throwing in a load of laundry. Once social distancing regulations began to lift, even more benefits to working from home emerged. The 6 p.m. workout class in my neighborhood? I can make that!
Therapy no longer meant an entire evening spent traveling to a midtown Manhattan office with a hard midcentury sofa and a white noise machine, but became a one-hour bright spot on my Google Calendar marked “appointment” sitting right in the middle of the afternoon, the Zoom call taken from the comfort and peace of my own bed. The kitchen fan in my home was renamed “the therapy fan.” Mornings where I didn’t have to spend as much time getting ready and didn’t have to commute at all meant I had a new chunk of day to do whatever I wanted. Reading, writing, the dishes from the night before. Or sometimes, if need be, catching up on sleep. Is that a crime?
As we all must, working from home evolved as the months, and then years, went on. With the option to go back to the office, I’ll admit it was nice to have a break from her once in a while. She wasn’t perfect—none of us are. Sometimes she brought about a stir-crazy feeling. She blurred the lines between the workday and the evening. And she separated me from something I’ve realized is necessary for a well-rounded life: office chit chat.
The flexible “hybrid” version of her that emerged was how I loved her best. I thought she had found her stride, and experts touted her as the future. It comforts me to know that so many of us did give her flowers while she was still here. She was loved.
By the end of last year, the same news outlets once proclaiming she was “here to stay” were wondering if 2025 would be the end of her. Five-day-a-week RTO mandates came down hard from companies like Amazon, Dell, and JPMorgan. Some major companies—Google and Apple included—still offer a hybrid model, but something in the ether feels like it’s shifted. Just this month, Instagram (owned by Meta) announced that it will call employees back five days a week starting in February. “Collaboration” is often cited as the reason for her demise, but it would be insulting to her memory not to point out the real things that killed her: RTO mandates, corporate real estate, even (maybe) Big Slop Bowl.
At Condé Nast, we were summoned back to the tower a mandatory four days a week in March of this year, but her spirit is kept alive on Fridays, when we have the option to work from home. I know I’m lucky to still have a piece of her with me, but I miss her when I leave for the office on a Wednesday morning with dishes still piled in the sink, when I can’t get a seat on the subway, or when I arrive home exhausted and hungry from a workout class that didn’t start until 7 p.m.
I hope we meet again someday—and I hope it doesn’t take another pandemic or world catastrophe to make that happen. Until then, I honor our fallen friend on Fridays with a home cooked lunch, midday walk, and maybe a 6 p.m. toast.
