A corrugated metal-clad office that nestles into a Cornish garden
A 5.6m × 3.2m garden office on a sloping, mature plot in Cornwall, clad in black corrugated metal and cedar, with a cloakroom and a hidden store.
Swift Unlimited don’t build the same garden room twice. Every project starts from a blank sheet, as a collaboration between the client and the designer, and the archive of their work we’ve featured makes the point better than we can – no two buildings are alike. They encourage clients to arrive at that first conversation with a wishlist: the features and finishes they’d love to include. Then the team sets about making it real. This garden office in Cornwall is a great example of how that approach works.
The client wanted a home workspace, but two things mattered as much as the room itself. It had to slot into a mature, sloping garden, and it had to look a particular way. They came to Swift with a clear vision for the aesthetic, and the team’s job was to turn that vision into a building that sat naturally in the landscape rather than imposing on it.
At a glance
- Size: 5.6m × 3.2m, split into an office, a cloakroom and a store with its own outside door.
- The site: A sloping, mature garden, built on ground screws in three and a half weeks on site.
- Exterior: Black corrugated metal on the front and rear, Western Red Cedar on the sides, under a 250mm soffit with LED downlights.
- Glazing: 3.6m-wide three-pane sliding doors, and a picture window beside the desk framing a chosen view.
- Company: Swift Unlimited, who connected the cloakroom to the mains.
A sloping site, left largely undisturbed
The office sits on a footprint of 5.6m x 3.2m. On a mature garden that slopes, that would usually mean disruption – levelling, retaining, and a fair amount of mess before anything gets built. Because Swift Unlimited use ground screw foundations, they can overcome sloping ground with relative ease, and because they’re an experienced team they know how to manage the build phase carefully, so the garden around the new room is disturbed as little as possible.
The photos are the proof. The finished office nestles into the landscape as though the ground was always shaped to hold it, with the mature planting around it left intact. The whole project was completed in three and a half weeks on site, which is impressive for a challenging plot.
An office that doesn’t look like an office
The owner wanted a home office, but they didn’t want it to look like a traditional one. That single instruction drove the whole exterior.
The front and rear elevations are finished in black corrugated metal cladding, chosen for its strong architectural look, while the side walls are clad in Canadian Western Red Cedar. It’s a deliberate contrast – the sharp, industrial lines of the corrugated metal against the warmth and grain of the timber – and the two materials play off each other rather than competing.
A 250mm soffit detail wraps along the front elevation and around into the right-hand side, with LED downlights set into it and the corrugated cladding carried up to form the fascia. Mixing two very different exterior finishes takes thought at the points where they meet, and the photos tell you the Swift team considered every one of those intersections. The materials come together beautifully.
Glazing placed around the work
The front wall of the office opens up almost entirely, with a 3.6m wide set of three-pane sliding doors connecting the workspace to the garden. When they’re open, the room and the garden become one space.
Beside the owner’s desk, a large picture window has been positioned to frame a specific view – glazing placed around how the room would actually be used, so the outlook from the desk was designed in rather than left to chance.
Three rooms including discreet storage
The floor plan is divided into three. The main workspace takes the bulk of it, alongside a cloakroom and a small storage room. The storage room has its own external access, and the door to it has been carefully detailed to dissolve into the black corrugated cladding – you have to look for it to know it’s there.
A cloakroom with a proper sink
The client asked for a cloakroom with a useable sink, and you can understand why. So many cloakrooms end up with a small, space-saving basin just big enough to rinse your hands. Instead, the Swift Unlimited team set a good-sized stainless steel sink into a wooden worktop, with cupboards underneath. It’s big enough to fill a kettle or wash up a few mugs, so the owner can take a break without heading back to the house for it.
Where the office is plastered and decorated, the cloakroom is finished differently – a stylish soft green painted, beaded tongue and groove panelling that gives the small room its own character. Swift handle the connections to the mains supply for a cloakroom like this as part of their turnkey service, so it’s ready to use from handover.
The result
What the client ended up with is a workspace they can use comfortably all year round, built into a sloping, mature garden with barely a mark left on it, and looking exactly as they’d pictured it. Every part of it followed from their brief and their wishlist – the aesthetic, the layout, the sink, the hidden door – which is precisely how Swift Unlimited work.
A garden office of a similar size and specification would cost in the region of £80,000 (2026). Swift work on projects across the UK, each one designed from a blank sheet for a client with a clear vision and a wishlist to match.
Learn more about Swift Unlimited
To find out more about Swift Unlimited’s bespoke garden rooms, annexes and extensions, visit www.swiftorg.co.uk. You can contact the team on 01625 875 588 or at support@swiftunlimited.co.uk to discuss your project.
