3m Tall Garden Gym With Shower Room by Eden Garden Rooms
Published: 30 June 2026
Reading Time: 3 minutes
A gym is one of the most popular uses we see for a garden room, and it's easy to understand why. A building at the bottom of the garden can be tailored entirely around how you like to train, with none of the compromises that come from squeezing equipment into a spare bedroom or the corner of a garage. This project by Eden Garden Rooms in Streatham, London is a great example of that idea done properly — a building shaped around weight training and cardio, with the convenience of a shower room for freshening up afterwards. We first wrote about Eden's work back in 2011, which makes them one of the longest established names in the industry.
Designing for the Weight
A gym that's going to carry heavy equipment is not a job for every garden room building on the market. The kind of weight involved in a proper weights setup — racks, plates, machines — puts demands on the floor and foundation that a standard garden room simply isn't built to take. Plenty of buildings sold each year are designed to a fixed specification, and that specification doesn't always account for this sort of load.
This is where working with an experienced garden room designer earns its place. Getting the floor build-up and the foundation right from the outset is what allows a gym like this one to be used hard, day after day, without the owner ever having to think about it. For this project the building sits on a concrete slab foundation, which Eden Garden Rooms liaised on to make sure it was specified for the loads involved. It's the kind of detail that doesn't show in the photographs but makes all the difference to how the room performs over the years.
3m Tall Garden Room
The client also had clear feelings about the height of the building, and being clear on that at the design stage was a wise move. Most garden rooms sold each year are no taller than 2.5m, which keeps them within permitted development. That 2.5m gives you the maximum flexibility in how close you can position the building to the boundaries of the garden, and naturally most people want to make the most of the space they have.
For a gym, though, a 2.5m external height doesn't give you much to work with inside. Once you've accounted for the floor and roof build-ups, the interior ceiling height ends up somewhere between 2.1m and 2.3m — and that's not enough headroom to use gym equipment comfortably. So with bespoke garden gyms we often see a taller building specified, and that was the case here. Working with Eden's design team, the client settled on a 3m tall garden room, which gives the owner the room to use their equipment comfortably without the ceiling feeling like it's pressing down on them.
An L-Shaped, Three-Room Layout
Eden's design is L-shaped, and the layout has been configured into three spaces: a main gym room, a cardio room, and an ensuite shower room.
The main room holds the weight-training equipment and opens onto the garden through a set of bi-fold doors. It's the largest of the spaces and the heart of the gym.
In the smaller wing of the L, the shower room sits tucked into the back corner. In front of it, the room houses the cardio equipment, with tall, narrow windows looking out onto the garden. The client has positioned their equipment so that whoever's using it can look out through those windows while they train — a small thought at the design stage that makes a real difference to how it feels to spend time in there.
The gym and cardio rooms can work as one open space, but internal bi-fold doors have been added so they can be separated when needed. It's a flexible arrangement that lets the gym suit more than one person training at once, or simply close off the cardio side when it's not in use.
Cedar Cladding and the Finishing Details
Outside, the gym is finished in vertical Western Red cedar cladding, complemented by anthracite grey fascia, door and window frames. It's a contemporary look that sits well in a garden setting. Western Red cedar is also a highly durable finish, with a natural resistance to rot and fungal attack, and it weathers gently over time.
The soffits have been detailed in cedar too, and it's in details like these that the quality of the carpentry shows. The mitres around the L-shaped canopy are the kind of thing only a carpenter with an eye for detail gets right — and it's clear Eden's team have that eye.
Learn More
Eden Garden Rooms build bespoke garden rooms in a contemporary style, hand-built on site using a multi-layer insulated timber frame system. Based in Kent, the family-run team work across the south of England, with every project overseen personally by the owners. To find out more or to discuss your own garden room, visit edengardenrooms.co.uk, call 0800 093 5339, or book a design call at edengardenrooms.co.uk/book-a-discovery-call.
