What’s a garden room?

Good question, glad you asked. It’s become a generic term that could refer to almost any structure in your garden that is not part of the main house.

It can all depend on your perspective. A planning officer will refer to it as an ‘outbuilding’. Some manufacturers may refer to it by the way the structure is to be used, for example “garden office”, “workshop”, “studio” or “summerhouse”. Others may reference a particular visual style such as “barn”, “shed”, “hut” or “cabin”.

However, some of these terms may be deliberately used to understate the reality. For example, “hut” may conjure up the idea of a small or basic building with an apex roof, when it in fact it is describing a substantial, streamlined and contemporary (timber-framed) room in the garden. Confusingly, it can also refer to a traditional Shepherds Hut. In this context though, they are both garden rooms if used in the outside space of your property. Even the word shed can be used, tongue-in-cheek, to describe a very high-end room in your garden.

There are also novel terms such as “pod” and trade-marked terms such “breeze house”, as a saturated market strives for differentiation. And we are borrowing descriptive terms from other countries such “friggebod” which is Swedish for a small house which can be built without any planning permission (bod is the Swedish word for shed and Birgit Friggebo was the Housing Minister in 1979 when these single-storey buildings were first permitted.) With the ever-growing popularity of Nordic design in the UK and the embracing of hygge-styled interiors, we predict you’ll be hearing more of these descriptive terms in the future.

[Images of buildings are featured because we love them and courtesy of the provider, not because they’re paid for. If this ever changes we’ll let you know here. 🌿🌳 ]

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