Why This Derbyshire Client Chose Crusoe Garden Rooms
Published: 7 September 2026
Reading Time: 4 minutes 10 seconds
There are two ways people tend to arrive at a garden room. Some know roughly what they want it for and how big it needs to be, then look for a company whose style they like or whose prices sit in the right range. Others start further back: they draw up an outline plan, want a real hand in the design, and take that plan to several companies to be priced. The traditional tender route.
That is what one recent Crusoe Garden Rooms client did. Their plan set out the room size, the window and door positions and the finishes, for one space doing two jobs: half home office, half relaxing garden room. Several firms came back offering only a standard product that missed the brief, and for the same scope of works the prices ranged from roughly what was expected to nearly double it.
What Separated the Shortlist
Three companies had quoted to the requirements as set out, and offered to tailor the design further. Crusoe Garden Rooms was one, and a phone conversation with Trevor, who runs the company with his wife Emma, earned a face-to-face meeting.
Crusoe Garden Rooms do not work to fixed panel sizes and configurations. Each room is built from scratch on the client's plot using traditional timber framing, by an experienced carpentry team, which suits anyone wanting something non-standard. Nor did the assumption that bespoke automatically costs more hold here. That approach was precisely what kept the project on budget.
The client gave Crusoe Garden Rooms a revised plan after the meeting. Trevor returned it within two days, fully itemised, with a fixed price and a build date attached.
Crusoe Fusion Cladding and a Deep Canopy Detail
The finished building is 8m x 4m. Crusoe Garden Rooms clad in either full Western Red Cedar or Crusoe Fusion, and the client chose the Fusion option, which puts the cedar on the most prominent elevations and marine-grade plywood on the walls that are less on show, finished here in two coats of weather shield paint in anthracite grey to match the frames. Durable, low maintenance and good-looking in its own right, it concentrates the more expensive cedar where it is actually seen.
The walls carrying the bi-fold doors are recessed back beneath the roofline, so the roof runs on past them to form a deep canopy. It shelters the doors and gives the building a strong shadow line and a lot of character.
A Glazing Configuration Worked Out by the Client
The glazing was the client's own thinking, and it is the part of the design doing the most work. Two sets of bi-fold doors meet at a corner, so with them open the room loses its edges and the line between indoors and out blurs almost completely.
A single glazed door for everyday access sits towards the rear, with a tall opening window on the wall beside it, forming a second glazed corner at the back. The result is a light room with different views of the garden from every part of it. A composite deck wraps around the building.
One Room, Two Halves
Inside, the space is left open, with partition walls forming a storage room in one corner. Walls and ceiling are plastered and decorated to the same standard as the house. Crusoe Garden Rooms build fully insulated, double glazed structures, which is what makes a room like this comfortable in January as well as July. Judging by the photographs, that is exactly how it is being used.
The client is an electrician, so the electrics and flooring finish sat outside the scope for this project. Normally the electrical specification is included and connected back to the house as part of the Crusoe Garden Rooms turnkey service.
Carefully Installed During a Wet Spring
Some people assume a building constructed entirely on site will churn up the garden and take longer than dropping in pre-made panels. Neither happened here, in an established garden with mature trees and deep borders on every side, and through a wet spring at that.
The foundations are ground screws, which need no excavation. There was no spoil to move and the lawn and planting were left largely undisturbed. Crusoe Garden Rooms also took additional measures to protect the garden as they worked, and the client's account of the two weeks on site is mostly about conduct: tidy, professional, checking each stage against what had been agreed. It finished on the agreed date, at the agreed price.
Which is the point of the exercise they started with. They went to tender with a drawing and a written scope, and the company that read them properly is the one that built it.
Learn More
Crusoe Garden Rooms are a family-run team based in Nottingham, building bespoke garden rooms on site for clients across mainland UK. To explore more of their work or discuss your own project, visit www.crusoegardenrooms.co.uk, call 07977 035 254, or email info@crusoegardenrooms.co.uk.
