The Glasshouse Garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025

Continuing our look at the finest shedlike structures coming up over the next few months at various garden shows, here's an early glimpse of Hollaway Studio's collaboration with longstanding friend of Shedworking the award-winning garden designer Jo Thompson for her garden at this year's Chelsea Flower Show (May 20- 24).

The garden is for the horticultural social enterprise The Glasshouse which supports training and employment opportunities for women in UK prisons and those who are recently released.
 
Hollaway Studio’s pavilion right at the centre of the garden is a contemporary interpretation of a Victorian glasshouse that offers a practical space for shelter and refuge, but also a peaceful retreat where women can connect with nature and one another - a space for women to come together as a community through gardening, and discover how horticulture builds confidence and skills.

Alex Richards, Managing Partner of Hollaway Studio said: “This has been a rare and rewarding opportunity to dissolve the boundaries between built form and nature. Designing a building to be part of a garden, rather than beside one, has allowed us to rethink the relationship between structure and setting in a truly collaborative way."
 
Designed in the round, the curved lightweight pavilion has no front or back, and features various pivoting screens to blur the lines between inside and out. Features include a completely retractable recycled acrylic façade, green sedum roof, integrated rainwater outlets. Interestingly, the garden was built using a green hydrogen-powered zero-emission JCB digger to build the garden, and the whole thing was built without concrete, the reclaimed stone floor resting on paving slabs, making it ‘no-dig’ and making minimal environmental impact.

Following the show, the garden and pavilion will be re-built in a women’s prison in the South of England.

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Thursday posts are sponsored by Cabin Master, bespoke garden rooms and offices designed, manufactured and installed throughout the UK