Expert Guide to Garden Rooms & Outdoor offices

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There are lots of reasons to invest in a garden room for your home, whether it’s for work or pleasure. And those reasons should be taken into account when you’re selecting which of the many buildings on the market you want to choose. How you plan to use your new garden building goes hand-in-hand with how much you want to spend, and how much maintenance you are willing to do for it.

What is a Garden Room?

Garden rooms, sometimes called garden pods, are simple enough to explain: an additional building in your garden, separate from the house, designed for inhabiting comfortably for extended periods of time. They are set apart from garden sheds and garages by the fact that they are not used primarily for storage, gardening tasks or home DIY projects that would normally be undertaken in a workshop. Since garden rooms are meant to be used in a similar manner to other rooms of the home, they are also generally different from summerhouses, due to their warmer cladding and reduced focus on being open to the sun.

A garden room is often a more affordable, less disruptive and easier to build alternative to a house extension. So when you need to add another room to your home, building this in the garden is an excellent option.

While there are garden rooms of other materials on the market, our expertise lies primarily in wooden garden rooms, so that is what this guide will explore.

Types of Garden Rooms

Garden Offices for Working from Home

A garden office workspace is one of the most common uses of a garden room. Whether this is for remote working within your employment, or a place from which to run your own business, more and more people are choosing to move their work into the garden.

Our full range of garden rooms can be used as a garden office, but some might be more suited to your particular work needs. For example, a simple desk and chair setup probably doesn’t need a particularly large room, but you might want to consider the insulation for long-term energy-efficient comfort. Other types of work uses such as hair salons will also want to consider the building styles and the ability to fit all necessary equipment inside.

Garden Gym Rooms

Garden rooms are a great place to take your home workouts, meaning you don’t have to fill your house with equipment or make noise on your floors.

Since this is a type of usage that has very specific requirements, we have a more curated selection of buildings for this, so visit our garden gyms page for the full range.

Or for further information, we have an extensive guide of what you need to know about garden gyms.

Year round garden rooms

If you are looking for an outdoor room that you will be able to comfortably use every single day of the year, you need to look at our insulated wooden buildings. While you might still need to turn on some heating on the coldest days of the year, these rooms will effectively retain heat for a cosy environment.

Garden room cladding options

Log cabin garden rooms

Most of our buildings that can be used as garden rooms are log cabins, meaning that they are built from individually stacked log boards which interlock at the corners for a distinctive look. But they aren’t just built this way for style; it also enables the wood to be thicker than on panel-based buildings such as sheds and summerhouses, and this provides you with an insulating element.

Our log cabins go up to 44mm in timber thickness, and the thicker they are, the more insulated they will be. You should consider this for not only how much of the year you want to use the room for, but for what purposes. A gym room, for example, might not need to be kept as warm as a garden office.

In terms of insulation, it is also affected by whether or not you opt for a double glazing upgrade (our cabins are single glazed by default). But you should consider a 44mm log cabin to be comfortable for 9-10 months of the year.

Insulated panel garden rooms

Our other type of garden room cladding is structured insulated panels (SIP). These prefabricated panels make for easier assembly than a log cabin, since the boards are already fixed together. Our designers have made it simple to insert insulation materials inside the panels of the walls, floor and roof, with materials such as EcoFoil and expanded polystyrene (EPS). Combined with double glazed windows as standard, these garden rooms provide robust barriers against the cold.

Composite garden room

Composite cladding is a protective synthetic cladding that is attached to the wall panel on the outside of the building, providing a complete barrier against moisture and rot. Still maintaining its wood effect, our composite garden room is paintable, insulated, and comes with uPVC double glazed doors and windows.

What is included with a wooden garden room?

With our garden rooms, you receive a complete building with the roof and floor. The roofs are covered with traditional felt, unless there are upgrades to alternative materials available.

Upgrades to the floor thickness, roof thickness, timber protection, and window glazing are available on log cabin garden rooms.

The following are not included with our garden rooms and will need to be acquired separately if you want them:

Electricity supply
Plumbing
Lights
Heating
Installation service

How much does a garden room cost?

The initial price of your garden room can vary by size, cladding, and whether you choose any upgrades. The best way to measure the costs for yourself is to click through our product range and change between the size options.

However, there are other costs associated with a garden room beyond the purchase of the building itself, including the installation of a base and any utilities. Fortunately, our experts have written an extensive breakdown in our Garden Room Cost Guide.

Will I need planning permission for a garden room?

The short answer is: it depends.

Like most outbuildings, garden rooms don’t normally require special planning permission for normal domestic usage for most people. However, this will be different if the room is to be slept in overnight, and it can also face different requirements if being used to run a business.

For a full explanation, including size and height requirements, read our guide to garden room planning permission.

And if you’re planning to run your own business from your garden office, jump straight to planning permission for outdoor offices.

How do I maintain my garden room?

Maintenance for wooden garden rooms can be boiled down to 3 main areas:

Maintaining the roof
Maintaining the floor
Treating the wood

The roof felt can take damage over time, especially after storms, so you should routinely check it to make sure no holes have started to appear.

Equally, the floor can take a lot of impact, so you should lift any carpets and check for damage. Replacing a damaged floorboard is best to be done as soon as possible for safety of use and for the integrity of the building.

In terms of treatment, the standard approach is to give a wooden building a fresh coat of preserver once a year. The best time of year to do this is at the end of summer, so you can prepare the building for winter while it’s still pleasant to do the work.

However, you can remove the need for this work by opting for the pressure treatment upgrade on your garden room. Adding pressure treatment not only extends your guarantee from 10 to 15 years, but it means you won’t have to treat the building yourself for a very long time (5-7 years). The main downside of this is that your building will arrive with a green tint to the wood, and it won’t be safe to paint over this for 4-6 months as the treatment still needs to dry.

By default, our garden rooms arrive either untreated or spray treated (which only protects the wood during transit).

Discover more about pressure treatment.