Don't be afraid to approach garden room companies with a set budget for your project. No reputable company will encourage you to spend more than you are comfortable with. Having a set budget for a project can breed creativity in a garden room designer, as was the case with this home office by Brighton based A Room in the Garden.
A Room in the Garden's client approached them with a fixed budget of £25,000 for the complete project. They wanted to create a home office at the end of their garden.
Working closely with their client, the A Room in the Garden team designed a 5.10m wide by 3.75m deep garden office. The aim was to create a building that had more character than the standard cube design. They certainly achieved that!
Considerate design
One of the design considerations was adding a window, so their client could look out at his garden as he worked at his computer. It was worked out that a traditional large window would let too much light into the room, meaning their client couldn't see his computer screen comfortably. A narrow rectangular window was decided upon, positioned just over the desk.
The A Room in the Garden team also designed an L-shaped canopy running along the front of the building. This not only adds a sense of depth and looks cool, but offers some natural shading for the room. When the sun is at its highest and brightest, the canopy will break its journey and offer a degree of shading, yet in the winter when the sun is low, it will not stop valuable light entering the room.
Clever material choices kept the project on budget
The core structure of the building is highly insulated structural insulated panels - SIP's. They sit on a groundscrew foundation system. The interior is plastered and decorated with a laminate floor.
It is the choice of the exterior cladding where the A Room in the Garden have been creative with budget and design. Rather than choose an expensive exterior finish like Western Red Cedar, which would have blown the budget, a pressure-treated Redwood cladding was used.
Rather than just clad the walls horizontally or vertically, the A Room in the Garden team did a mixture of both. Fixing the Redwood horizontally around the bottom of the building. To enhance the detail, they also applied a dark oil to these boards.
Above the band of horizontal cladding, they fixed the rest of the boards vertically and left these their natural honey brown colour. We think it looks great!