Garden rooms and conservatories are popular features here in Milton Keynes, as with most of the UK – bridging an internal and external space. I am often asked by clients to design a garden room opening out onto their garden space – though sometimes the client intends to redesign the garden as a separate exercise.
Building Tectonics isn’t a Garden Design company and I for one hardly know a Lillac from a laburnum tree, let alone their botanical names! However, the way the layout of the garden relates to your house is important and I do often happily end up advising clients on this aspect of design too.
Clearly if you want to make the most of your garden room in the summer and mid-season then having large patio or bi-fold doors is important so that you can create that ambiguous space that is neither fully inside nor outside… like a room in the garden!
Bifold doors are all the rage at the moment, and the cost for a reasonable quality set has halved and halved again in the last 10 years making them very affordable. One word of warning here though – please make sure that whatever bi-fold doors you choose are high quality and come with a good guarantee – they’re a moving part that may get plenty of usage, especially if they become your main door onto the garden. Don’t just think of them as a bit of static building but perhaps more like a mechanism that may even need some maintenance in due course. Also, it’s important to consider security and ask if the product has been assessed by Secured By Design, the UK Police initiative supporting the principles of “designing out crime”.
A really successful approach to this inside-outside relationship is to create an “outside room” space directly adjacent to your patio or bi fold doors. At its simplest this might just be a rectangular patio, but a pergola or low wall may help define the space and reinforce a feeling of semi enclosure.
We tend to feel more relaxed and at peace when we are in a defensible space than when we are in a completely open space, and yet we can feel claustrophobic when too enclosed. An “outside room” can be a perfect balance between these two states. I suspect that we have an innate sence of preservation that makes us feel more secure when we are within a defensible space and yet not trapped.
Of course the conservatory is often thought of as the natural answer to this desire for ambiguous space, but in my opinion seldom satisfactorily achieves either.
I have just returned from talking to new clients who have lived with their conservatory for 10 years and now realise that it stands in the way, quite literally, of a proper extension. Ten years is not bad since conservatories often look very tired after a short while, and given that most families only use them for a few months in the year, they are not the answer if you need more permanent space.
The record we’ve seen in terms of a short life cycle was an 18 month conservatory that was demolished to make way for a room that could be used all year round!
We have been involved in designing structures to support a new roofs over conservatories, making them much cosier and we have also acted as expert witnesses in a legal case where a conservatory company had erected a south facing conservatory… with no openings!
There is of course a place for a conservatory – but it is by no means a substitute for a proper piece of building if you need to use it all the year round. A well designed house or extension with the benefit of a well connected outside space, also thoughtfully designed, seems to give most home owners what they want and need.
Featured photo courtesy of LISGirl