Garden Recording Studio with Acoustic Porch by Garden Spaces
Published: 10 July 2026
Reading Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
We have written about a lot of Garden Spaces music rooms over the years, and one of the reasons we keep coming back to them is that no two are laid out quite the same way. The acoustic principles stay constant, but the way those principles are packaged around each client and each plot changes every time. This studio in Isleworth is a good example, because it solves its brief with a detail we do not often see: the door has been placed on the side of the building rather than the front.
The building measures 3.7m wide by 4.5m deep externally, giving a floor area of 13.8sqm. It rises to 2.85m at its highest point outside, holding a 2.4m ceiling within. As with all of their music rooms, Garden Spaces ran this as a turnkey project, from the planning application through to a wired, decorated studio ready to record in.
An Acoustic Porch Detail
The acoustic porch is the detail most associated with Garden Spaces' music rooms, and it is what tends to set their acoustic work apart. The idea is simple but effective: instead of one door between the garden and the room, you pass through two, with a small buffer zone in between, so sound has to cross two separated thresholds rather than one.
What makes this project stand out is where that porch sits. On most builds the entrance is on the front elevation; here it has been moved to the side. The porch itself is 450mm deep, forming a proper little vestibule between outside and studio. On the outer face is a glazed uPVC door with acoustic glazing; step through it and you meet a solid internal fire door fitted with specialist acoustic seals — one door glazed and welcoming from the garden, the other dense and tightly sealed where it matters most. There is no single right way to build one of these, either: look back through the archive of Garden Spaces acoustic rooms we have featured and you will see the porch resolved with different combinations of door styles, each chosen to suit the client and the elevation.
Height, and Why Planning Was Needed
At 2.85m to its highest point, the building sits above the height Permitted Development allows within two metres of a boundary, and sitting close to the rear and right-hand boundaries it needed a planning application to go ahead. The extra height is a deliberate trade: it gives a more generous internal volume, which helps both the feel of the room and the acoustic build-up.
Garden Spaces handled this for the client as part of their overall service. If your own project is going to need planning permission, working with a company like Garden Spaces, who are experienced in these applications, takes a lot of the pressure off you.
A Window Placed Where It Counts
On the front elevation is a small rectangular window, set high in the wall. From outside it reads as a simple, restrained opening. Move inside, though, and the thinking becomes clear: it sits directly above the owner's workstation, dropping top-level daylight straight onto the desk where it is most useful.
Glazing is always the balancing act in an acoustic room, because every opening is a potential weak point for sound. Glass is one of the leakier elements in any acoustic envelope, so the answer here is to glaze well rather than glaze less. The window is built from two back-to-back units fitted with acoustic glass — a double skin rather than a single pane, which is how you bring daylight into a studio without letting the sound follow it out. A small window doing a clever job.
Thermowood Cladding on the Visible Walls
The visible elevations are clad in Thermowood, a heat-treated softwood with a lovely grain and a warm, honey-brown tone. Heat rather than chemicals does the work, drying the timber out to make it more stable and durable, and left to weather it drifts gently towards a soft silver-grey with no maintenance needed to keep it there.
On the hidden elevations, Garden Spaces switched to cement particle board, finished in the same colour as the door and window frames — they carefully colour-match this kind of detail so it reads as a considered choice rather than an afterthought. On faces you rarely see, it makes good sense: a durable, very low-maintenance finish where timber's upkeep and cost would be wasted.
A SIP Core and the Platinum Package
Underneath the cladding, the building is constructed from SIP (Structural Insulated Panel) panels, giving it a rigid, highly insulated thermal core. That is a strong starting point for any garden room, but for music use it is only the beginning. Garden Spaces then tailor the acoustic specification with the client, offering several packages so you can choose the level of soundproofing you actually need.
This studio was built to the Platinum package, one of their higher specifications. Acoustic performance comes from combining mass, separation, and absorption through the walls, ceiling, and floor rather than any one product, and the results are measurable: Garden Spaces' own demonstrations, which you can watch on their website, show real-world testing achieving in the region of 60dB of noise reduction, even with ambient noise around 40dB. That is the difference between a full-volume session inside and barely registering it a few metres away. Fresh air comes in through an acoustic wall vent, so the room can still breathe without that vent becoming the easy path for sound to escape.
Foundations Through an Existing Base
The foundations are a good illustration of the joined-up service Garden Spaces offer. The studio was built through an existing concrete and paved base rather than clearing the ground first, and to carry the load reliably the screw pile lengths were increased from the standard 1250mm to 1750mm, so each pile reached the depth needed to meet the 12kN minimum. It is the kind of behind-the-scenes decision that never shows in the finished room but makes all the difference to how it stands for years.
Finished, Wired, and Ready to Record
Inside, the studio is finished much like a new-build house, plastered and decorated in a specialist paint in the owner's chosen colour, with laminate wood flooring underfoot. The electrics are surface-mounted rather than buried in the walls — a deliberate acoustic choice, because chasing cables into the wall would mean cutting into the very layers doing the soundproofing. Keeping the sockets on the surface protects the acoustic envelope, and here it was all planned around the client's own acoustic components from the outset. Temperature is handled by an air-conditioning system chosen to run as quietly as possible, so it heats and cools the room without adding noise to a space built to be quiet.
With the shell delivered to the Platinum specification, the owner has since added their own acoustic treatment, and it's a proper studio setup. There's a mix of absorption panels on the walls, corner traps for the low frequencies, and patterned timber panels that scatter the sound rather than just soaking it up, with a panel hung over the desk as well. It's a good illustration of how the two things work together: Garden Spaces build the sealed, soundproof shell, and the owner tunes how the room sounds inside it.
Because it is a turnkey service, the client was handed a wired, decorated, ready-to-use studio, with foundations, planning, structure, and acoustics all taken care of by one team.
Learn More
Garden Spaces design and build bespoke garden rooms across mainland England and Wales, including highly specified music rooms tailored to different levels of acoustic performance. It is worth exploring the archive of their acoustic rooms we have featured on The Guide, where you can see the acoustic porch resolved with different door combinations to suit each client. To see their video demonstrations of real-world acoustic testing, or to discuss your own project, visit www.gardenspaces.co.uk, call 0845 387 9 387, or email info@gardenspaces.co.uk.
