Coming late to the garden-office party, Alice Vincent was hoping someone else might have taken the hard work out of creating the perfect garden studio
ILLUSTRATION ALICE PATTULLO
It feels very, well, 2020 to be bringing up the whole garden studio thing. Remember this time three years ago, when we all emerged, blinking, into that glorious summer in the wake of lockdown, sitting on our individual picnic blankets and still not hugging our friends? Chances are you would have had a conversation about a garden office/gym/studio at some point. Sales of garden buildings increased by 500 per cent between January and May 2021; sheds weren’t far behind with a rocketing rise of 460 per cent.
And now, ever the harbinger of cool, I have joined the masses in getting a ‘studio’, or a ‘posh shed’ in the garden. Theoretically, it’s there to be worked in – not that you’d ever find me calling it a ‘shoffice’.
Arriving to the party three years late, I would have thought that the process might have been easier, frankly. I’d naively hoped to have the thing built last October. We finally got it done in May. Planning permission was a huge spanner in the works: outbuildings less than 15m square and shorter than 2.5m are allowable by permitted development rights, but if you live in a flat, like we do, you don’t have permitted development rights. Thus ensued a papertrail in which we discovered we lived in a conservation area nobody – not even our solicitor or patient planning liaison – knew existed. It’s all been very dull, with the exception of a baby arriving in the middle of it all.
The baby was the main motivating factor: he sleeps in the room that I used to write in, you see. And so a posh shed to house a wall of bookshelves and a desk was considered a solution. I suppose if I worked out I could have dedicated it to dumbbells, instead, or walls of eggboxes, as a podcasting friend aspires to. Many of us harbour posh-shed dreams: my father built a workshop that, adorably, has its own adjoining tiny microshed, which holds garden tools.
Knowing which one to buy was a minefield. Garden studios range from DIY efforts created from second-hand windows, sheets of plasterboard, and the assistance of corner spirit levels and YouTube, to swoon-worthy architectural wonders that start around the £30,000 mark as a ballpar
