Each morning, Stella Chase gets out of bed, puts on her work clothes and makeup and begins the commute to her job.
She doesn't have far to go. Her interior design business, Stellar Interiors, is just a few feet down the hall, in a bedroom of her Hillsboro house.
"I could go get a storefront out in downtown Hillsboro, but that would just be a whole lot of overhead," said Chase, 27, who opened her business a year ago. "I find working from home is the best option for me. It means low overhead and everything is centralized."
Chase is one of more than 126,000 business owners operating a home-based business in Oregon, according to a 2002 survey done by the U.S. Census Bureau. Nearly half of the nation's 23 million businesses are home-based, according to that survey.
That's no surprise to Deanna Palm, president of the Greater Hillsboro Area Chamber of Commerce, who routinely works with professionals who operate from home.
Palm said the number of people in the area working from home has been fairly consistent over the past few years. "We had that big blitz when the dot-com surge was going on" in the mid- to late '90s, she said, "and there was an emphasis on that type of business, but that has leveled out a bit."
The advancement of technology and the widespread use of the Internet has helped create a population of work-at-home professionals who are shaping the workplace, said Verna Reardon, chairwoman of the Computer Application and Office Systems department at Portland Community College's Cascade campus.
Although there have been people who worked from home for years -- Reardon mentioned medical-record transcriptionists and stay-at-home moms who turned out resumes -- their business growth was limited by the proximity of their clients.
"The Internet frees it up," Reardon said. "It definitely makes it global and allows people to work with clients outside of their immediate area."
Some industries, however, still carry a stigma that home-based business owners are less professional, Reardon said, citing lawyers as one example.
"You've got to overcome that perception," said Tiffany Estes, 35, owner of Whole Brain Creative, a Hillsboro graphics design and marketing firm. After working at home for four years, Estes moved her office to a downtown space in June. "But once you've done a good job for somebody and completed the work on time and charged them a fair price, they get over that."
Chase, who usually meets interior design clients in their homes, said she's never had a client who seemed to care where her business was based as long as she could do the job.
"I readily tell them that I work in a home-based office, because that's what I do," Chase said. "I think it all comes down to how you present yourself."
The bigger challenge, said Dylan Paul, 40, owner of Able Carpentry in Beaverton, is networking.
"The overhead of running a home-based business is low," Paul said. "But the downside is low visibility. That's one of the reasons I joined the chamber, to get my business out there."
When Estes was setting up shop in 2002, she joined the Hillsboro chamber, volunteered for several committees, became a member of Rotary and signed up to help with events and activities. She also sought out other designers.
"This gives you a reason to get out and be with other people," she said, "because if you work by yourself eight to 10 hours a day, it can be maddening."
Plus, it can be hard to balance work with pleasure. Estes said she abandoned her home office after four years, because she felt like she was always working.
"I got so busy that I was working at night and at home during the day and at home during the weekends. It just got to the point that I couldn't relax in my own home," Estes said.
"But it's nice to be able to get up and go straight to your desk and start working. Now I probably spend about an hour getting ready and getting out of the house."
Garden Office
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