Bespoke Garden Buildings, Built to Order

Insulation and electrics. That is genuinely the whole answer.

A garden building has neither. It is a heavy-duty, made-to-measure structure with practical finishes, built for storage, workshops, garages and seasonal use. A garden room is insulated in the walls, roof and floor and comes wired with sockets and lighting, so you can work, train or relax in it in January.

The build quality is not the difference. Both are made from the same panels in the same Shropshire workshop by the same people, both are delivered and installed by our own team, and both carry the same ten-year structural guarantee. What changes is what goes inside the walls.

Price follows from that, and most of the gap is insulation, glazing, electrics and the finishes that come with a room you sit in rather than store things in.

The practical test is simple. If you are going to spend hours out there in December, you want a garden room. If you are going to open the door, take out a bike and shut it again, you want a garden building and you should not pay for anything more.

Compare the Garden Rooms range

Usually not. Most garden buildings are covered by permitted development, which means no application, provided the building stays inside a few limits.

Height catches people out most often. Within two metres of a boundary the whole building can be no more than 2.5 metres tall, and that is measured to the top of the roof rather than the top of the walls. Move it further than two metres from every boundary and you get more headroom: up to 4 metres to the ridge for a dual-pitched roof, or 3 metres for anything else.

Garden buildings have an advantage here. Because there is no insulation, no plumbing and nobody sleeping in them, they sit comfortably outside building regulations in almost every case, which is not always true of the insulated ranges.

Conservation areas, listed buildings and National Parks all have tighter rules, and a garage close to a boundary occasionally needs a second look.

Rules vary between councils, so confirm with your local planning authority before ordering. This is guidance rather than planning advice.

Read the planning permission guide

From £3,406, and three things move the number from there.

Size is the biggest lever, but not in the way most people expect. A bigger building costs less per square metre, and a squarer plan costs less than a long, narrow one of the same floor area, because there is less wall. If you are choosing between two sizes, the larger one usually buys more usable space per pound.

Specification comes next. Cladding is the main choice: composite costs more up front and asks nothing of you afterwards, timber costs less and wants occasional attention. Extra windows, a wider door, a pitched roof and a partition wall all add.

Then there is the base, which is the honest surprise on any garden buildings quote. A level, load-bearing base is not optional, and on a sloping or soft garden it can be a meaningful share of the total. It is also the item most often missing from a comparison quote, so check what a rival price actually includes before you judge it.

Rather than a guessed figure, use the configurator: every option shows its price as you choose it, and the itemised price is the price we quote. Flexible finance over 10, 12 and 24 months is available if you would rather spread it.

Every garden building needs a level, load-bearing base, and we sell it as an add-on so you can either take it from us or arrange it yourself.

There are two routes. Ground screws are steel piles driven into the ground to carry the building on a frame. They suit most gardens, go in within a day, need no concrete and no curing time, and cope well with slopes and soft ground. They also leave the ground largely intact, which matters if the building might be moved or removed later. For most garden buildings this is what we recommend.

A concrete base is the traditional alternative and still right in some situations: very poor ground, very heavy loads, or where you want a solid slab anyway. Ground screws can carry a car as well as a garage or carport, so a garage does not need a slab. It costs more and takes longer, because concrete has to be poured and then cured before anything is built on it.

Two things are worth knowing. The base is the most common cause of delay on a garden building project: if the ground cannot take the load, that work has to finish before installation starts. And we do not survey every base ourselves, so please read the requirements we send and tell us if you are unsure. If the base is not level on the day, we cannot build on it and a return visit is chargeable.

More on bases and foundations

You can, but it is the most expensive way to get there and we will always tell you so.

Retro-fitting insulation to a building that was not designed for it means opening up the walls, roof and floor, losing internal space to the depth of the insulation, and dealing with the vapour barrier and ventilation that a properly built room has from the start. The result costs more than the difference between a garden building and a Garden Pod, and it never performs as well.

Electrics are more straightforward but not trivial. Any new circuit run from your house consumer unit is notifiable work under Part P, so it needs a qualified electrician and a certificate on completion. That can be done to a garden building, and plenty of people do, particularly for a workshop that wants light and a socket: ask us about an electrics pack and we quote it on the call.

So the honest split is this. If all you want is power in a workshop, adding electrics to a garden building is reasonable. If you want to be warm out there, buy a range that was built to be warm. Insulation is the one thing that has to be designed in.

Longer than most people assume, and the ten-year structural guarantee is the same one that covers every other range we make.

What determines lifespan is cladding and upkeep. Composite cladding is effectively maintenance-free: it needs no treating and holds its colour. Ordinary timber wants a waterproofing paint soon after installation, kept up yearly, and Thermowood needs no paint. Neither is better; they simply ask for different things, and the choice is yours at design stage.

The jobs that genuinely shorten a building's life are small and avoidable. Blocked gutters are the main one, followed by damaged cladding left unrepaired and fixings that go unchecked after high winds. Half an hour twice a year is realistically all it takes.

Being uninsulated does not shorten the life of the structure. What it does mean is more temperature swing inside, so anything stored in there should be something you would be happy leaving in a garage, not paperwork, electronics or musical instruments.

The other half of longevity is who you bought from. Because we design, manufacture and install every building ourselves, a problem in year seven is a phone call to the people who built it.

Yes, and those are two of the three jobs this range does best.

For a garage, the numbers that matter are the door width and the internal length, and both come from your car and your gateway rather than from a catalogue, because every building is made to measure. Bring the measurements to the showroom or put them straight into the configurator. Access to the plot matters too: we will check the route in before installation day rather than discover a problem on it.

For a workshop, the useful upgrades are extra windows for daylight, a wider door for getting materials through, a pitched roof for headroom over a bench, and a partition wall if you want the tools at one end and the mower at the other. For light and a socket, ask us about an electrics pack, or have a qualified electrician add it afterwards.

The one thing to be clear about is winter. A garden building workshop is comfortable for jobs that keep you moving and cold for jobs that keep you still at a bench for hours. If most of your workshop time is the second kind, look at an insulated garden workshop instead: same team, same guarantee, and you will use it far more.