18 Bricks&Mortar
A contemporary garden office from Rooms Outdoor, whose designs start at £18,755. The company has had a surge in inquiries since the start of lockdownintended to develop it as a product, but
other projects always got in the way.”
He has christened the design Room,
and makes it to order. Prices start from
£26,040, plus installation, foundation
and electrics, timdenton.info. Denton
says: “It creates a completely
different pace of life. Breaks
in the day are occupied
with watering the
garden, tending
to the veg plot.
The best things
[about the
garden room]
are feeling
connected to
the natural
world and
separating
work from
home. Both of
these things make
for a very mindful
work-life balance.”
While most garden
rooms resemble scaled-
down versions of traditional
architecture, some look like lunar
landing pods or sci-fi domed cities in
miniature. There are shingled globes
such as the Archipod, from £18,000,
archipod.com, and Podmakers’ Escape
Pod, with “aircraft-style plug door”, from
£23,760, podmakers.co.uk. The latest to
arrive on this planet are 3.6m-diameterfor the adults to listen to music or read a
book. The version pictured cost £43,800,
including fees and furniture, fixtures and
fittings, but the studio can supply
a simplified version from £39,000,
studiobenallen.com. Studio Bark’s
U Build is an architect-designed garden
room on a lesser budget. The self-
assembly outdoor room starts at £7,
for a flatpack kit, u-build.org.
After months of being cooped up, the
call of a cabin in the wild has never felt
stronger. Rupert McKelvie has been
designing small buildings for indulgent
but low-impact living since he founded
his studio, Out of the Valley, in 2014,
having trained in wooden-boat building
and cabinet-making. He says demand for
his aspirational ecofriendly cabins has
soared since lockdown. McKelvie’s small
garden rooms start at £33,600.
This year’s projects have included an
ambitious extra-large design built for
a mid-Devon client, featuring an oak
kitchen and an outdoor deck with a
copper bath, with similar starting from
£168,000, outofthevalley.co.uk. Set in a
habitat that’s home to kingfishers, otters
and owls, the building is meticulously
ecofriendly. “This cabin met very high
insulation and airtight values, and when
tested was near Passivhaus standards,”
McKelvie says. “The cladding is local
cedar. We used completely natural
building fabrics, plant-based insulations,
natural clay plaster and cedar cladding
and breathable open diffusion
membranes. Basically, it’s a very
healthy building that breathes and
regulates humidity.”
Should you wish for nothing wilder
than a common or garden outdoor
office, several specialist companies
supply admirable examples, including
the Garden Escape and Green Retreats.
John Keenan of Rooms Outdoor, whose
garden offices start from £18,755,
roomsoutdoor.co.uk, says that since
the onset of the pandemic he has
experienced a surge in inquiries. “Our
clients expect to be working from home
for the foreseeable future, and many
want their offices to be up and running
before the winter should there be a
second spike. The other increase that
we have seen is clients looking for guest
accommodation, so that [if there is a
second lockdown] extended families
can stay together as one unit, and care
can be provided to elderly relatives.”
Tim Denton, a furniture designer,
was so unimpressed with the outdoor
rooms available to buy
that he created his own
fantasy garden studio
in Douglas fir
with a distinctive
shingled exterior,
inspired by
the timber
buildings of
Lemuy island
in Chile.
“My business
spends a lot
of time
building lovely
structures and
things for other
people, so I wanted
to turn the focus on
to myself for once,”
he says.
When his furniture-making
workshop in an industrial unit in
Trafford Park, Manchester, closed due
to coronavirus, he was able to work from
the cabin at home. “It’s been an absolute
blessing to have it over the lockdown
period. It made me realise how many
people would be thinking about having
a space like this right now. I had always
He created Hypedome as outdoor
dining pods for the hospitality industry,
and, when restaurants and hotels
promptly closed, took to Instagram
to find private buyers.
“We started contacting people
on social media and offering them
domes. We created a YouTube series
of workouts featuring our operations
manager, with the hashtag
#stayatdome.” Customers began totransparent polycarbonate hemispheres,
which were launched at the beginning
of March. The founder of Hypedome,
Adam Lyczakowski, is a career-long
geodesic dome geek. He says: “There’s
an interesting fact about the geodesic
dome type of building. It’s the most
cost-effective type of structure that man
can build when it comes to the area you
can cover versus the amount of material
you have to use.”National Garden Scheme
Shed, from £3,710, the
Posh Shed Company.
Left: a Study Box (3.4m x
3.4m), designed by
Box 9 Design, costs from
£33,000, bertsbox.co.uk