Prefab Garden Rooms: Compare All Five Ranges Side by Side

Specification, finish level, and how much of the project we handle.

Garden Buildings are heavy-duty but uninsulated and unwired, built for storage, workshops and garages from £3,406. Garden Pods add insulation to the walls, roof and floor from £6,976, with electrics as an upgrade, which makes them our most cost-effective insulated building for all-year space. Garden Rooms are the core range from £9,061, with quality insulation, certified electrics and A-rated glazing as standard and almost everything else specifiable.

Signature Garden Rooms are the premium turnkey option from £11,136, built on SIPS panels, clad in cedar or the cladding of your choice, with the foundation, electrics and fitting all included. Granny Annexes are designed for domestic living, with a steel chassis, selected partitions and 32A electrics included; kitchens and shower rooms are optional quoted upgrades.

The comparison tables further up this page set all five out row by row, and the pattern is consistent: as you move up, more moves from optional into the price.

Stronger, in the ways that matter for a garden building.

A prefabricated garden room is made under cover on a workshop bench, not outdoors in whatever weather turns up. So the timber, the insulation and the joints all go together dry. That matters, because the single biggest cause of problems in garden buildings is moisture getting into the structure while it is being built.

Factory manufacture also means the same team makes every panel to the same tolerances. The result does not depend on which trades were available that week.

Every Noah building of every range carries a ten-year structural guarantee, which is not a warranty we would offer on something we thought was fragile. The one genuine requirement is a level, load-bearing base, which is why the foundation row in the table above matters as much as it does.

In everyday use they mean the same thing, and most UK suppliers use them interchangeably.

Strictly, prefabricated describes where the building is made: off site, in a factory or workshop, then assembled on your base. Modular describes how it is put together: from panels and sections that combine into different sizes and layouts rather than one fixed design.

Noah's buildings are both. They are made in the Shropshire workshop, and they are built from modular panels. That is what lets us size a building in one-foot increments, up to 30ft each way, instead of offering a fixed catalogue.

What neither word should mean is a flat-pack kit you assemble yourself, or a standard box you choose from a page. If a supplier uses "modular" to mean "these are the four sizes we do", that is a different product from this one.

Garden Rooms, for most people. A prefab garden office needs insulation, sockets and light, and Garden Rooms is the first range where all three are standard rather than optional, which is why it is our core range and the one most offices come from.

Garden Pods work if the budget is fixed and you will pay separately for electrics. The pod's foil insulation is genuinely all-year, so the compromise is finish level rather than comfort. A modular garden office at £6,976 plus electrics is still a real working space.

Signature makes sense if you are on video calls all day and want new-build-level insulation, acoustic panelling and air conditioning. It also makes sense if you would rather we handled the foundation and the fitting.

Garden Buildings is the one range to rule out for an office: with no insulation and no power, it is not a working space. There is more detail on the garden offices page, including sizing for one desk versus two.

Four of the five. Garden Pods, Garden Rooms, Signature Garden Rooms and Granny Annexes are all insulated as standard in the walls, roof and floor, so an insulated prefab garden room from any of those four ranges holds heat in winter and stays tolerable in summer.

The difference between them is how well: foil insulation on pods, quality insulation on garden rooms, and premium SIPS panels on Signature and annexes, which is the same approach used in modern new-build housing.

Garden Buildings are the exception: they are uninsulated and unwired, which makes them excellent from April to October and cold in January. That is the trade that keeps them at £3,406.

It is also worth knowing that an uninsulated summer house or log cabin is a garden building, so if you want the cabin look for winter use, you want the insulated version from the Garden Rooms range rather than the seasonal one.

Our ranges start at £3,406 for a garden building, £6,976 for an insulated pod, £9,061 for a garden room, £11,136 for a Signature and £20,555 for a basic 16 × 10ft Granny Annexe pent studio including VAT. The annexe starting specification has a standard 1ft front canopy, timber cladding, one glazed single door, no windows, MDF lining and laminate flooring, a steel chassis on the GSB foundation and white 32A electrics with four double sockets and six spotlights. No kitchen or shower room fit-out is selected; these upgrades are quoted separately including internal plumbing. Mains connections are arranged by you or separately quoted by Noah, with site approvals confirmed before ordering.

Those are starting prices for each range. The useful number is the one for the size and specification you actually want. You can get that yourself in about three minutes in the configurator, including the cost of the upgrades in the tables above that are priced on screen. Finance is available over 10, 12 or 24 months.

Usually not. Most garden rooms, pods and garden buildings fall under permitted development, which is why the majority of what we install needs no application at all. The rules turn on height, boundary distance, how much of the garden you are covering, and whether you are in a conservation area.

Granny annexes are designed for domestic living. An annexe meeting the legal definition of a caravan and used ancillary to the main home may qualify without a full planning application. Our planning partner checks the design, site and intended use; letting or Airbnb needs a separate full-planning and building-regulations specification and quote. The Granny Annexes page compares the routes.

Our planning permission page walks through all of it. We will also tell you honestly if we think you need an application before you order.

Yes, and we would recommend it if you are torn between two ranges.

Our indoor showroom in Telford lets you walk into buildings from different ranges within a few paces of each other. That is the fastest way to understand what the specification differences actually feel like. A table can tell you one range has premium SIPS and another has foil. Standing in both tells you what that means.

You can also see the cladding finishes in real daylight, which matters more than people expect. Cedar and composite photograph very differently from how they look on a grey Tuesday in Shropshire.

Plan your visit, or if Telford is a long way, ask us for the brochure and a video walkthrough instead.