Garden rooms can be offices, playrooms, teenage dens, start up spaces, art studios, music studios, outside kitchens, workshops or places for craft and mucking about. All are relevant, all have great use in the management of mental health and wellbeing.
After all, everybody needs a space to do their “thing”.
Recently, I designed a garden room for Tropical Plants UK, for RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The garden room showcased what we felt “buying and growing British” meant to us. To me as a designer, it meant the importance of buying into great design, it meant buying local, it meant believing in well designed and well cared for product.
We used the strapline “Keep calm and grow British”, and the vibe of James Bond and Stormzy. Many people that visited our garden room said they would love their home office or study to feel like our garden room did.
The left hand wall was fitted as a “living plant wall”. The plants with the least varigation in their leaves were placed in the darkest corners, as they needed less light, whereas the plants with the most varigation on their leaves ended up nearer the light. We purchased our light fittings from commercial retail, and a brilliant member of the team cut the light down to size and made it fit the space.
My concept was to design the garden room as a space for all members of the family, whatever their interests or age. The desk doubled up as a kids pool table – when you slid the top off. In the corner the plant case was supposed to have been a shower, but budget constraints meant that it just became a show off case, for the plant.
There was a calming chair in the corner to read, and the wall to the right was covered in environmental graphics, which talked about the British houseplant industry, and used some factoids to try and back this up.
Renewable energy was created, which powered the lights used in the exterior plant display from an exercise bike. My concept was that the exercise bike powered the whole stand.
The walls featured a motif drawn from the Coldstream Guards. I drew them delivering the plants, to potential customers homes. And developed them into a repeat wallpaper design. I also developed the motifs I had drawn, using the plants and an abstracted Union Jack motif, and designed them into a textile design, which I had printed and made into cushions.
We featured the Union Jack, which I painted in an urban colour scheme on the outer building wall, and we used pre-loved furniture, which we sourced locally. The opening day of the show, the client commissioned a fabulous Jamaican steel band, which got all of Chelsea in a right tropical mood!
Exercise bike outside the exhibition stand provided renewable energy to power lighting
Garden rooms are a useful way to help your family and your business grow and develop. If we can help with any queries as to the type of garden room your family has need for drop us a line. We work with many UK manufacturers, and have many options, which will suit any budget.
