It depends heavily on the job and the person.
I've done quite a bit of remote work over the years, and one of the keys I've taken away from it is that you absolutely must have an isolated, "work only" space - mixing work and normal computer space is a bad idea, and having it be just a corner of the house, if anyone else lives there, just doesn't work out well. It's too hard to keep work and not-work separated. During the day, family distractions arise, and during the evening, work has a way of cramming it's way in.
So having isolated space is pretty much required. Currently, my solution to this is an 8x12 shed on a corner of my property (complete with solar panels - the joys of off-grid power for my work) that's pretty well isolated. I can easily walk back to the house during the day (and do, multiple times, for coffee/restroom/etc), but I'm "at work," and my wife/kids generally leave me alone unless they actually need something. For me, at least, another aspect of that is trying to avoid burning the house down - I do, among other things, lithium battery pack rebuilding/R&D, and while I'm insanely conservative about how I do that, the reality is that if I've got a bad cell or something that lets go, it stands a tolerable chance of burning my office down. I'd really rather it be an outbuilding and not the house.
I've seen rooms at the end of a basement work decently (with a door), but it really has to be a dedicated space or things don't work well. The kitchen table is a horrid work from home location.
A few other people have mentioned this, but the type of work really matters too. High-interaction sort of stuff can be done remotely, but it's hard, and requires an awful lot of deliberate thinking around how to do communication, notification, etc. Some web dev companies have done a good job of this, but other companies that allow remote work don't have much infrastructure for it, and then it's on the remote worker to really ensure they're plugged in - whatever that looks like. The downside is that the interactive stuff (Slack, IRC, group video hangouts, etc) can ruin the ability to concentrate that remote work really excels at.
If you have isolated tasks, especially what Cal Newport would call "Deep Work" sort of stuff, a remote/isolated workspace can work exceptionally well. I've done work that substantially amounts to, "We have no idea if X is possible on Y platform, with Z constraints - can you look at that?" That's very well suited to remote work, with the right person, because they can dive into something for 6 hours with no distraction, do that for many days in a row, and come up with an answer, proof of concept, or whatever is desired. But that's also non-tightly-coupled work, and it's pretty specialized stuff as well. But it also means you have to be properly good at staying on task, and keeping focused - open ended R&D stuff can turn into hours of mindless... whatever. You have to aggressively schedule your time as well.
Remote work is definitely nice when the option exists, but it's actually quite hard to learn to manage it properly. It took me about half a decade to really work out the details of how to do it well and effectively, without work taking over my entire life.