360 Creations: rotating garden offices

If, like the Shedworking staff, you have a penchant for sheds and shedlike structures that revolve, you will have enjoyed Bryan Lewis Jones rotating shed which won the Unique category in the 2016 Shed of the Year awards (pictured above and in the video below). 

And you might also be interested in Bryan's business emerging from the victory, 360 Creations, which builds similarly high quality rotating sheds and garden rooms. The leading model is the 'Ultimate Shed' which naturally has a fully 360 degree revolving turntable and features including sheep's wool insulation, copper roofing, a woodburning stove, underfloor heating, and air conditioning .

And if for some reason you don't want a shed on a turntable, they can make you one which stays still.

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Rotating garden office cabin

As regular readers will know, the Shedworking staff are suckers for a rotating shedlike atmosphere and Telmo Cadavez's micro cabin - as featured on Tiny House Talk - is a beauty. Inspired by Portuguese wagons, it is made out of pine wood, cork (insulation) and covered with black slate, with quite a simple interior that features a double bed. Overall it's 8 m2. If you want to try one out, you can hire it on a visit to the Montesinho natural park. The video below shows it rotating. ----------------------------------------------------

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Celebrity rotating shedworking health tips

Bernard Shaw’s Rotating House Is an Aid to Health appeared in the August issue of Modern Mechanics (which has been revived at the Modern Mechanix site). In the article above, Shaw suggests that he is in the pink thanks to the amount of sun his rotating garden office affords him. "Mr. Shaw has a plan to keep the sun shining on him constantly while he works," runs the feature. "He has constructed a small hut on his grounds that is built on a turntable. When the morning sun shifts, he merely places his shoulder against the side of the hut and gives it a push so that the warming beams fall through bis window at the correct angle. Mr. Shaw’s plan to keep the sun shining on him is a simple health measure, and not a wanton eccentricity. The author has spent most of his life out of doors, but when he moved to London he didn’t get as much sun as he thought he needed. Hence the hut."
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Rotating Sphere Lounger

If you're not so keen on a fullyfledged shed, how about this lovely shedlike atmosphere, the Rotating Sphere Lounger from Birmingham-based Farmers Cottage Lamps. The sphere is made from pressure treated pine laminates with a diameter of 2.4 m. Each timber circle is approximately 90mm wide and 120mm deep and between each section is a polycarbonate window to protect the neo-shedworker from the elements while allowing you to watch the rain fall. There are polished stainless louvers above and below the window which Farmers Cottage Lamps say help reflect the environment around it. Shedworking is, as regular readers will know, a sucker for a rotating shedlike atmosphere - here, the platform is mounted onto an angle iron ring which has a series of roller bearings attached to it. This upper angle iron frame sits into a lower angle iron ring, which then makes a track for the sphere to rotate on. Also available is a canopy set to clip over the front of the sphere to enclose it and make a full tent area of the entrance. All in all, very nice.
Via Anne from My Urban Garden Deco Guide which explores the fast changing world of urban gardens and where you can also read a short piece by me on shedworking.
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Now playing: Takuo Yuasa; Ulster Orchestra - Glass: Company - Mvt. 1
via FoxyTunes

Revolving summerhouse as rotating medical centre

A marvellous glass plate negative of a revolving summerhouse being used to house a sick soldier sent in by Matt Plummer of The Fourpenny Workshop. As many of you know, these kinds of rotating summerhouses were used widely in the UK a century ago and were based on Alpine chalets in Swiss tuberculosis sanitoriums - for more on the medical side to garden offices, do have a look at What Tuberculosis did for Modernism: The Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture, an excellent article by Margaret Campbell which you can read here.

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Revolving shed - technical expertise appeal

Shedworking reader Sam Krijan has been in touch to tell us of his intriguing plans to build a rotating shed on the spot pictured above, remote from his own home. If anybody has knowledge of turntable mechanics (and/or how George Bernard Shaw's rotating shed worked), please do email him. It sounds like the final build will be an interesting one: Sam plans to use solar energy, catchment water and local building materials, maybe including straw bales. The overall size will be determined by the turntable, but should not exceed 10x10. We'll post updates on Shedworking.

Friday Finery: Rotating Seater

A lovely view from one of the smaller models in the Ornate Garden pod range, the Rotating Seater.

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Scott's new National Trust sheds at Chelsea

It's not just the main show gardens which feature sheds and garden offices. Scotts of Thrapston are displaying their new range of summerhouses produced in collaboration with the National Trust at the show this year. There are two models, neither with insulation as standard though this is an add-on option:

* The Writer's Retreat, inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s rotating garden shed near St Albans. Scott's describe the building's styling as "shabby romantic" and it comes with a Chalk Blue finsh, pressure treated, redwood boarding, and (nice touch this) an upholstered, full-width day bed. There's also a foldable desk and galvanised corrugated metal roof. Best of all, it can be fitted with a rotating base as was Shaw’s writing hut.

* The Reading Room, inspired by the tool shed at the bottom of Virginia Woolf’s garden is a similar size but made from oak and has a drop-down day bed, writing table and book shelves and period ironmongery to create a garden retreat of rare appeal.

kubus: the space between

A lovely rotating shedlike atmosphere from sturm und wartzeck, designed as one in a series of modules which could fit together to make a home. But, as Lloyd Alter at Treehugger says: "With garden sheds and small spaces being all the rage, it stands on its own quite nicely." There's a lovely video of it rotating, complete with church bells in the background, here.Via Treehugger and archicentral
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Henry Moore's rotating shed at Hoglands is now static

Henry Moore's rotating #shed @Hoglands now static. pic.twitter.com/Y3Pq7y2aoF

— BRIAN ELBOURN (@elbournarch) August 29, 2016

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Design ideas for garden rooms

An excellent pictorial piece at Ideal Home about garden offices, buildings and sheds, with examples from eDEN Garden Rooms (above) and Cuckooland.com (pictured top). Here's a snippet about

Farmer’s Cottage seven-seater rotating garden pod from John Lewis & Partners:

"Garden pods are ideal for dining, studying or entertaining," says Vicky Angell, buyer for outdoor living at John Lewis & Partners. Consider the pod size carefully: think about how many you’d like to seat, and how it will look in the garden – too big and it may be overpowering. "A rotating design that can be angled away from wind and towards the sun can help make best use of the space at all times of the year," adds Vicky. A roof cover, blinds or solar-control glazing will help to deflect heat and ensure a comfortable temperature, even on the hottest day.

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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master: garden offices and studios to fit any size garden. Top quality contemporary or traditional buildings.

Rotating garden shed (video)

If there's one thing guaranteed to make the Shedworking staff go weak at the knees, it's a revolving shed.
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Leigh Brooks - revolving shed design

During the summer we reported on the Line of Site's Spot Brief competition to design a garden shed with a difference. One of our favourites was the revolving shell shed from Leigh Brooks from Brooks and Ware architects. If you click on the image above you'll see a short animation of how this would work in practice. Here's what Leigh told Shedworking about the design:

"The overall concept was driven by the need to provide both a secure environment coupled with the need to provide varying degrees of views out. The rotation idea came from a study of the circular rotating driveway turntables that are now readily available within a sensible price range that allow you to turn your car around 360 degrees on the spot with the push of a hand."

Shedworking Awards 2012

We've been running our annual prizegiving for a mighty three years now, an opportunity to give a pleasant pat on the back to some of the finest achievements in the shedworking world over the last 12 months. It's been another busy year and so without further ado let's move towards the first gold envelope...

Best design – It’s been another great year for shedlike designs. Most recently, the Forest Pond House (one of the designs up for an award on the AJ Small Projects award) caught our eye, but over the last 12 months we’ve marvelled at tents which looked like sheds, caravans which looked like sheds, floating sheds, rotating sheds, and naturally sheds like hobbitholes. In the end, the winner is as much about concept as design. Custom Built Surrey run by Mark Burton, does produce some nicely built shedworking atmospheres but what Mark is really trying to do is raise awareness of the importance and advantages of tiny house living. In the USA the movement towards living small is really snowballing. In the UK, there are some meagre signs of its emergence, but if it takes off then it will be in no small part due to Mark. Nice work.

Best blog/web site – 2012 was the year that Pinterest really made its mark on the world of sheds with boards popping up all over the interwebs celebrating garden offices and other small design wonders. But in the main while these were a delight to browse, they largely involved simply scrapbooking other people’s work. So it’s ‘traditional’ blogs which have won the day this time round. In joint second place are two blogs which detail the design and build of garden offices, http://buildgardenoffice.blogspot.co.uk and http://buildingastudio.wordpress.com/. Which means that in first place is http://shoeboxdwelling.com run by design journalist Natalia Repolovsky. While not specifically targeting shedworkers, many of Natalia’s posts are perfect for those in garden offices since they feature transformer furniture, desks, shelving and storage in general, all in a succinct yet illuminating style.

Best Tweeter –  At its worst, Twitter is a platform for dullness and selfpromotion. At its best, it provides an insight into another world.  The @plankbridge feed from shepherds’ hut specialists Plankbridge was exactly this, always interesting, friendly without being imposing, frequently using photos and video to mix things up, and above all, genuinely reactive rather than simply using it as a broadcasting medium.

I'm framing up a Writers Hut, the smaller version that we do. It's going to be a craft studio for a customer twitter.com/Plankbridge/st…
— Plankbridge (@Plankbridge) December 22, 2012

Best popularisation of shedworking – A former Shed of the Year winner, it was not the smoothest of years for Songs from the Shed run by Jon Earl. But despite the challenge of financing arguably the UK’s leading music venue, Jon and his impressive list of invited musicians have brought us some tremendous sessions in 2012 (as regular readers will know since we often highlight some of our favourites on Shedworking), and in so doing underlining that shedworking comes not only in all shapes and sizes but also sounds. Help to keep them going by donating to the cause on their site.

Readers' Award – This year’s RHS Chelsea Garden Show had many sheds – and in fact a shepherd’s hut too - on display. Indeed there was a whole separate area devoted to them. But this year’s runaway favourite as nominated by you the readers (in second place was the appealing George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces television series, closely followed by Jane Field Lewis’s excellent book My Cool Shed) was Jo Thompson’s Silver Gilt-winning show garden which featured a garden office-ish caravan, at least partly inspired by the Shedworking blog. It was a lovely garden, a marvellous caravan, and Jo is a smashing lady. Congratulations.

Lifetime achievement award – Lloyd Alter is not a shedworker (though he does have a marvellous outhouse) but this has not stopped him from promoting this blog almost from the very beginning, as well as being a critical friend of what we are attempting to do with it. Many of you will know Lloyd from his work on Treehugger.com where he shares his deep knowledge of the world of architecture and passion for a sustainable lifestyle with a large readership. He writes well, he’s generous, and he has a fine sense of humour. He is, in short, a big hitter and it’s a privilege to have him on our side.

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Henry Moore's rotating garden office studio

Henry Moore Studios & Gardens at Perry Green have recently refurbished the sculptor's Summer House (pictured above) which was one of a number of studios and sheds in which he worked from 1940 onwards. Moore bought the Summer House in the early 1950s and erected it in the Hoglands garden. According to the charity: "It provided him with an informal space for drawing connected to the outdoors and with plenty of natural light. Originally mounted on a turntable, it could be rotated to change views and find the best conditions at different times of the day." Sadly, it is now static though still very much worth a visit.
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George Bernard Shaw's writing hut in the latest issue of the Idler

The latest issue of the Idler magazine is now out. It has my usual columns on sheds (and snooker) including a look at how George Bernard Shaw used his garden office to promote his own campaigns. Here's a snippet:

Thus, in August 1929, Shaw stood in front of his hut for a photo for Modern Mechanics & Inventions magazine to promote the idea of sunlight as a healing agent (the dramatic postures he effected for these shots were also in line with his interest in eurhythmics, the concept of developing one’s sense of rhythm through movement). He also had windows installed that were made from Vitaglass, a recent invention that allowed UV rays to come through, letting, the makers said, “health into the building”. That move, which was also picked up by newspapers, and indeed his very ownership of a hut with a turntable, placed him in the vanguard of medical thought, since rotating summerhouses were used to treat people suffering from tuberculosis.

You can read the rest - for free! - at this link.
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Colani Rotor House

Another example of how garden offices and homes might eventually meld together is the Colani Rotor House from Luigi Colani and Hanse Haus. In a small area just 36 m², they've fitted in various areas (kitchen, living room, bathroom) using a rotating system, a kind of cross between George Bernard Shaw's writing hut and a lazy susan.

360: shedworking without a shed

We've covered lots of booths and home office pods for use inside the home rather than as a strictly garden office - here's another, the rotating (we love it already) 360 from FAK3. It was built for a client who wanted a multifunctional central space for eating, working and having fun. So it houses a keyboard as well as a desk and a television. Apparently the industrial strength bearings can support up to two tonnes and you can make the whole thing revolve at the touch of a button.As FAK3 say: "Its off-centred axis means as the cabinet moves, its content and form shifts the room’s perceived spatial configuration to give each zone its own character." Lovely.
Via Yanko Design

Shed Box of Delights: Epic Retreats

Shedworkers who want somewhere remarkable to work in or a busman's holiday in the loveliest parts of Wales can now enjoy a vacation at one of eight specially-designed cabins as part of the Epic Retreats project. It's a partnership between Best of Wales, Cambria Tours and George + Tomos Architects, with funding from the Welsh Government’s Tourism Product Innovation Fund.

There's only around 200 bookings available as part of this Wales’s Year of Legends 2017 so you will need to get your skates on. Pictured are Shedworking's three favourite designs, from the top, Dragon's Eye by Carwyn Lloyd Jones (features including a rotating round bed), Arthur's Cave by Miller Kendrick (lots more details at their site), and the Slate Cabin by Trias.
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Shaw's writing hut opens to the public for the first time

The public were officially allowed in to Shaw's Corner for the first time on March 19, 1951, when the National Trust flung open the doors. The BBC archive has an excellent little video about it which includes a very short piece of footage of the rotating summerhouse in which he wrote that starts at the 3:30 mark. A nice little treat for the weekend.

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