13sqm Writer's Bothy Beside a Waterfall by JML Garden Rooms
Published: 6 August 2026
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Many garden rooms are asked to do several things at once. This one was commissioned to do a single thing well.
The owner approached JML Garden Rooms for a writer's retreat in the lochside grounds of their home at Loch Tay, on a steep bank beside a waterfall. The brief was quiet: somewhere calm and inspiring for writing and reflection, with room for a desk and a comfortable reading corner, and, in the owner's words, "not just another home office". The finished building is 13sqm, completed in July 2024, and it does exactly that.
A Contemporary Take on a Traditional Bothy
The JML Bothy Range is their interpretation of a traditional Scottish bothy, a plain shelter in a remote spot. They have kept that silhouette, a simple gable and a pitched roof with no ornament, then respecified it as a properly insulated modern garden room.
Every JML Bothy is built from a structural insulated panel kit, manufactured by their sister company JML SIPs. SIPs give a continuous layer of insulation with very few gaps for heat to escape, so the building holds its warmth and costs little to run. Coupled with high-specification double glazing throughout, that is what turns a small clad building on a Perthshire hillside into a room that can be used in January as easily as in July.
The Bothy Range is well specified as standard, but this project sits at the bespoke end of what JML offer, with their in-house architectural team working alongside the client to design in the material choices and detailing the brief called for.
Glazing That Frames the Landscape
The glazing is a mix, and each opening is doing a different job. Full-height windows run floor to ceiling, a wide picture window fills much of one wall, and a horizontal window sits at desk height on the gable wall.
The desk-height window is the one that shows the thinking. Sit down to write and the view is framed at eye level, the landscape held in a long rectangle like a picture above the desk.
The oversized floor-to-ceiling picture window is the wow moment, though. It frames the waterfall in the bank outside and brings the water, the ferns and the moss right into the room, close enough that the sound comes with it. Watching that view move through the seasons must be a large part of why the owner uses the building.
A Calm Birch Ply Interior
Inside, walls and pitched ceiling are lined in birch ply, which gives the room a warm, mid-century feel and a quietness that a painted plaster finish would not have. It answers the brief directly: a tranquil space to think in.
The detailing is what lifts it, and the ceiling is where to look. The pitched roof gives it several planes that fold together as they rise to the ridge, and the ply has been set out so the joints follow that geometry and line through with the panels on the walls below. Every junction is held with a refined shadow gap, so the boards read as deliberate lines rather than seams.
Rust-Toned Corrugated Metal and Thermopine
The exterior takes a different palette to the black corrugated and larch of the Bothy annexe JML built on Loch Fyne, which we featured recently. Here the corrugated cladding is rust-toned, warm rather than graphic, and it sits against the greens of the wood in a way black would not. It is paired with horizontal Thermopine, timber modified with heat so it stays stable and durable outdoors without chemical treatment.
The front wall is recessed to form a porch, lined in the same Thermopine and framed by the sharp gable outline of the corrugated shell. It is a small move that gives the building a sheltered, welcoming entrance and a shadowed depth to the front elevation.
Getting a Building Down a Steep Bank
The site was the difficulty. Access down the steep, sloping ground took careful planning, with all-terrain vehicles used to move materials safely down the banking and enough people on hand to manage it.
The foundations answer the same conditions. JML Garden Rooms worked with local groundworkers and a specialist ground screw company to create a stable base, screws being well suited to a sloping, wooded site because they need no excavation and leave the ground around them largely undisturbed. Their joinery team then erected the custom SIPs kit and completed the full external and internal fit-out.
Learn More
JML Garden Rooms design, manufacture and build bespoke garden rooms and annexes across Scotland and into England from their base in Perthshire. To explore more of their work or discuss your own project, visit jmlgardenrooms.co.uk, call 01764 663 668, or email info@jmlgardenrooms.co.uk. Their Perthshire showroom can be visited by appointment.
