Sanctum Garden Studios have gone international! They recently travelled to a village near Le Mans, France to install a bespoke contemporary garden room. This is an interesting project, not quite a standalone garden room building, but not a traditional garden room extension either. It’s a hybrid of the two.
Sanctum Garden Studios customer wanted to add an insulated contemporary garden room between two walls. Each wall having a doorway that would lead into the new room. The addition of this new room would turn the L-shaped property into a square.
Because the contemporary style of a Cedar clad garden room is quite different from the local vernacular, a planning application had to be made. The local Mayor & Council liked the design and happily passed the application.
Remote site visit
Because of the distance involved, the Sanctum Garden Studios team relied on their customer to provide the measurements for this project. These needed to be accurate, as the Sanctum team make use of off-site construction methods and the building was manufactured to these measurements in their Chorley workshops. The accuracy of their client’s measurements was particularly important when it came to the openings in the garden room structure that would need to match up with the doorways from the main house. Apparently, the customer’s measurements were spot on!
Sanctum Garden Studios have developed their own foundation system. With this project, however, the plan was to dig up the concrete slab where the room would sit. On investigation, it was found that this slab was very thick with steel reinforcement, so it was decided to leave it intact and build the garden room on top of it.
A taller garden room than normal
This garden room is taller than you will typically find built here in the UK. Most garden rooms of this style are built to comply with Permitted Development, and this requires the building to be no higher than 2.5m if it is going to be sited within 2m of any boundary. French properties have higher ceilings and door openings, which needed to be taken into consideration in the design of this building.
A 3.4m x 3.5m building was created with a 2.4m set of French doors with a fixed panel alongside. A narrow letterbox style window has been positioned at desk height on the side wall. This window has two top hung openings. A rectangular skylight with triple glazing has been fitted into the roof structure. Adding high-level natural light like this is a clever design trick and will make the room lovely and light.
Sanctum Garden Studios build garden rooms throughout the UK, and as we can see into Europe too. To learn more about their work, take a look at their website or give the team a call on 01275 279 161.
