The Hobby Room Is the Biggest Home Project Trend Right Now, TaskRabbit Report Finds

The guest room is losing its grip on the American home. According to TaskRabbit’s new 2026 Trend Report, homeowners are increasingly converting spare square footage into rooms designed around their own hobbies, routines and interests — a shift the company sums up as “The Independent Home.”

The numbers behind the trend are striking. Comparing booking and search activity from January through July 2025 with the same period in 2026, TaskRabbit found craft room projects up 33% year over year, home gyms up 59%, saunas up 35% and podcast studios up a remarkable 90%. General decorating requests climbed 57% as well.

Designing for the life you actually live

Driving the change, in part, is a rise in solo living. TaskRabbit reports that living alone increased 58%, while searches and bookings for help moving alone rose 24%. But the report’s advice applies to households of every size: stop reserving valuable space for how a home is supposed to look, and start shaping it around how you actually spend your days.

TaskRabbit’s marketing chief Tamara Rosenthal puts the old model bluntly: the traditional guest room that sits empty roughly 350 days a year, kept just in case an out-of-town relative visits, is officially losing its appeal. Letting an entire room sit idle for hypothetical guests, she argues, no longer makes sense for most people.

Small rooms, personal returns

The encouraging part is that the trend does not require a spare bedroom. A corner of a garage set up for woodworking, a closet converted into a recording nook, or a landing turned into a reading chair and bookshelf all follow the same logic — space earns its keep when it serves a real, repeated pleasure rather than an occasional obligation.

For homeowners thinking about resale, the report suggests the calculation is changing too. A well-finished hobby space signals a home that has been genuinely lived in and loved, and buyers increasingly respond to rooms with a clear purpose. The spare room, it seems, is finally being asked to justify itself.

Source: Sunset