Umberlow
0121 496 0742 Book a free site visit
A white-painted garden building with tall glazed doors, a vine growing across the front and clipped box at the base.

Home  ·  The range

Garden rooms across Warwickshire

Composite, timber and oak, and what each one is for.

We buy from more than one manufacturer, because no single one of them makes the right building for every garden. The five we fit most are below, with sizes and prices. Which one ends up in yours comes out of the visit.

Book a free site visit Fixed quote after the visit.

CoventrySolihullWarwickLeamington SpaStratford-upon-Avon

How one gets chosen

Everybody wants to talk about cladding first. It's about fourth on the list, and the first three decide it.

What you're going to do in there sets how much room you need. The room you need and the way in set where it can go. Where it goes sets what the ground has to do first. Only then does it matter whether the walls are composite, timber or oak.

Which is why nothing gets picked before somebody has stood in the space with you.

The five we fit most

The range

Five buildings we put in most

Each of these has gone into a garden between Coventry and Stratford in the last year. Footprints are external. The price is for the building, delivered and put up on a base that's ready for it, with VAT in. Groundwork, electrics to the building and the garden round it are priced after the visit.

A black-clad garden room with a pitched roof, standing at the edge of a lawn.

The Barford

3.0 × 2.4 m · composite · pitched roof

A desk and a chair, a small gym, or somewhere to sit with the doors open.

Lead time 6 to 8 weeksFrom £14,500

A white-painted timber garden room with tall glazed doors and a vine across the front.

The Lapworth

4.0 × 3.0 m · painted timber · pitched roof

An office with a sofa in it, or a summerhouse that still gets used in October.

Lead time 8 to 10 weeksFrom £19,800

A cedar-clad garden studio with a fully glazed gable end, lit from inside at dusk among trees.

The Ettington

4.2 × 3.2 m · cedar · glazed gable

A studio that wants the light: painters, potters, anyone with a piano.

Lead time 10 to 12 weeksFrom £24,900

A long grey garden building with full-width sliding glass doors at the end of a striped lawn.

The Hatton

5.0 × 3.6 m · composite · flat roof

A games room with a pool table, a gym with a shower off it, or a guest room.

Lead time 10 to 12 weeksFrom £27,500

An oak-framed building with a tall glazed gable and green timber doors set into a rendered wall.

The Wootton

6.0 × 4.0 m · oak frame · tiled roof

An annexe, a garage with a room over it, or a building that has to look older than the extension.

Lead time 16 to 20 weeksFrom £42,000

Sizes can move in 300 mm steps on any of them, and all five come in other cladding colours. If the one you want is between two of these, say so on the visit and it gets drawn at the size you need.

Side by side
ModelThe BarfordThe LapworthThe EttingtonThe HattonThe Wootton
Footprint3.0 × 2.4 m4.0 × 3.0 m4.2 × 3.2 m5.0 × 3.6 m6.0 × 4.0 m
CladdingComposite, grey or near-blackTimber, painted to your colourWestern red cedar, left to weather or oiledComposite, grey or near-blackGreen oak frame, rendered or brick infill
RoofPitched, EPDM rubberPitched, slate-effect tilePitched, standing seamFlat, EPDM rubber, 400 mm overhangPitched, clay tile
GlazingPair of glazed doorsFrench doors and two windowsFull-height glazed gableFull-width sliding doorsOak-framed glazed gable, timber doors
Built for all yearYes: insulated floor, walls and roofYesYesYesYes, to house standard
ElectricsTwin sockets, lights, heater pointSame, plus data pointSame, plus data pointSame, plus shower-room circuit if neededFull consumer unit
Lead time6 to 8 weeks8 to 10 weeks10 to 12 weeks10 to 12 weeks16 to 20 weeks
From£14,500£19,800£24,900£27,500£42,000
A dark composite-clad garden building with a pitched roof and a gravel path, photographed at dusk.

Composite

The one you never paint

Composite cladding is wood flour and recycled plastic pressed into a board that reads as timber from three feet away. People choose it for one reason, mostly. They've had a fence or a shed they kept having to re-stain, and they're done with it.

It comes in greys, browns and near-blacks that hold their colour. On something you'll be looking at from the kitchen window every morning, that matters more than it sounds when you're stood in a showroom.

Weathered timber shingles on the corner of a building, close up, silvering along the exposed edges.

Timber

The one that changes colour

Cedar and larch start honey and go silver-grey over a few years. Either you love that or you really don't, and it's worth knowing which you are before the lorry arrives. Left alone they weather. Oiled or stained they stay nearer where they started, and you're up a ladder every so often for the privilege.

Painted timber is the third way, and it's what people pick when the building has to sit near a house with painted joinery on it.

The bits that change everything

Cladding, glazing, roof

The cladding profile

Feather edge, shiplap, wide board, shingle. The profile sets the shadow line down the wall, and that's the thing people notice about a building without being able to say what they noticed.

How much glass, and which wall

Sliding doors, French doors, a fixed pane on the gable end. This is the decision that changes what the room is like to sit in, and it's the one people spend the least time on.

Which way the doors face

A garden room with its doors pointed at a fence panel is a shed with a nice floor. Half the job on the visit is working out what the building should be looking at.

Flat roof or pitched

Flat keeps the overall height down, which starts to matter when you're close to a boundary. Pitched buys head height and stops the thing reading as a box on a lawn.

The overhang

A bit of roof past the doors keeps rain off the threshold and stops the glass streaking every time it blows in from the west. Cheap at the drawing stage. Expensive once it's built.

The size

Set by what's going in it. A desk and two chairs is one building. A pool table with room to pull a cue back is a different one, and you find that out with a tape measure, not a brochure.

Horizontal timber cladding boards fixed to a frame, the grain lifting where the sun has caught it.
New timber rafters and joists on a roof frame, seen from below against trees.
A timber deck at night with low seating, a fire table and planting along the boundary.
A rendered building with a tall oak-framed window and green timber doors.

Oak

Oak buildings and garages

Oak-framed garages, car ports and annexes, cut and pegged the way they've always been cut and pegged. They cost more than the rest of this page and they take longer, and people order them anyway, because oak is the one material here that most of us think improves with age.

An oak garage also does something a plastic one can't, which is look like it came with the house.

A charcoal barbecue burning against a dark timber garden fence in the evening.

Outdoor kitchens

Grill, worktop, somewhere dry

A run of covered paving, a grill set into a worktop, and the room right behind it for when it turns and everyone piles inside. Which it will, because this is Warwickshire.

It gets drawn with the paving, the levels and the lighting rather than bolted on afterwards, and that's the difference between an outdoor kitchen and a barbecue with a roof over it.

How the garden gets designed

What people put in them

Same building, different arguments

A garden office and a hot tub room are the same building with entirely different arguments about power, glass, floor and heating. So each one gets its own conversation on the visit, and its own drawing afterwards. The home office has a page of its own; the rest are below.

Read our home office page Home office Power in a trench, glare on a screen, and whether you'd actually sit in it in January.
Home gym Floor build-up, ceiling height for a rack, and where the noise goes at six in the morning.
Music studio Mass, isolation and a door that shuts properly, so the neighbours never find out.
Bike room and cinema Doors wide enough to wheel through, and a dark end you can throw a picture at.
Hot tub room and bar Ventilation, a floor that likes water, and a lit path back to the house.
Guest annexe Where a bed, a shower and a drain change what this is, and what the council calls it.

See one lit after dark

A long table under a tree in a garden at dusk, lit by hanging bulbs.

Before you ring

What people ask about the range

Four we get every week, answered the way they get answered standing on a lawn.

Composite or timber?

If you want to forget about it, composite. If you want the building to weather into the garden and you don't mind a ladder, timber. If the house has painted joinery on it, painted timber usually wins on looks. Nobody has ever regretted this decision as much as they expected to.

Flat roof or pitched?

Height near a boundary is what usually decides it rather than taste. Flat keeps you low, pitched gives you headroom and a better-looking building. We check what the height limit is on your plot before we quote, so this is a real choice rather than a hopeful one.

How long from order to finished?

The lead times against each building above are for the building itself. Add the groundwork, which depends on the plot, and anyone giving you a total over the phone before they've seen it is guessing. You get the dates in writing with the quote.

Can it have a loo in it?

Sometimes. It needs a drainage run back to the soil stack and a fall the whole way, and that's the point where a garden room stops being a delivery and starts being a small building job. Worth asking on the visit, because the answer depends entirely on where your drains already are.

A formal English garden with clipped hedges, a circular reflecting pool and a red-brick house behind.

Next step

Stand in the garden with us

Somebody comes out, walks it with you, measures up and tells you what will actually fit and what it'll take to get a base in there. You get a fixed quote after that, in writing. The visit is free.