Taylor Swift credits a garden office for her success in Nashville Hall of Fame speech

Taylor Swift was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame earlier this week and in her acceptance speech discussed the pivotal importance of a garden office music studio at an early stage in her career. Here is the relevant section: 

"And then my most favorite was a place called Jody Williams Music, an independent publishing company that was located in the little craftsman house.

"And, you know, let's say the year is like 2005 in this memory. My mom would pick me up from Hendersonville High School, drive me downtown and drop me off and I'd scamper in the front of Jody Williams Music and I'd say hi to Katherine who worked at the front and sometimes her boyfriend Eric would be there visiting.

"Things have gone great for them. They've got a couple kids, married like 20 years now. His full name is Eric Church, just for clarity. But then I'd run up the stairs and I would plop down on the couch in front of Liz Rose in this room that was painted red.

"I'd say, 'Liz, this happened at school today. I've got a hook that I want to like, you know, we've got to write this thing.' And she'd get her notebook and we'd just write so fast.

"And when we finished with the song, you know, I'd kind of jog out the back of this house to the backyard where there was a garden shed. And in that garden shed was a one-person studio where Jody Williams Music's favorite demo producer, Nathan Chapman, was making demos.

"And I would run in, and Nathan would play every single instrument on these demos, and he interpreted my music so intuitively that later on I would fight for him to produce my entire first album."

Pic credit: Ronald Woan via Flickr

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

 

Studio Flat garden office

An excellent case study from Malvern Garden Buildings focusing on the Studio Flat model owned by chef and writer James Strawbridge who uses it mostly as a garden office, but also as a gym, art studio, and general family relaxation zone. Here's what he says:

“I always wanted it to be multifunctional, but it has become even more versatile than I expected. It’s a rowing room, home-education classroom, editing suite, art studio and a place for banjo lessons. It feels like a proper extension of our home and gives us space for creativity, fitness, music, art, work and mental wellbeing. For me, it’s primarily somewhere to work and create. I can switch off by playing music or using the rowing machine, but it’s mostly a calm, productive space.”

You can read the rest of the interview and see plenty of interior and exterior images via the link above. 

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Wednesday posts are sponsored by Booths Garden Studios, the UK's No.1 supplier of zero maintenance and portable garden studios

 

Composer's Cabin comes to St Pancras station

My favourite build from Chelsea Flower Show this year has come to meet a wider public in St Pancras station in London

Post-show, the Martha Krempel and Malvern Garden Buildings delight is now on display in the main concourse where passersby can nip in and learn more about garden offices, shedworking, and peatland conservation. Or as the St Pancras folk put it:

Visitors are invited to pause during their journey, explore the space and reflect on the relationship between creativity, nature and the environments that inspire both. The installation also celebrates London St. Pancras Highspeed’s long-standing connection with music through the inclusion of a Steinway Spirio self-playing piano, creating moments of reflection and spontaneous performance throughout the day. 

You can nip in and have a gander until June 21. 

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

 

Blue Forest's luxury treehouses coming to St Martin-in-the-Fields this summer

 

Treehouse specialists Blue Forest will transform the grounds of St Martin-in-the-Fields, overlooking Trafalgar Square, into 'Lost Oasis' an immersive urban garden of timber, greenery, food, drink, sport and live entertainment.

Designed and built by Blue Forest in partnership with Cornwall’s Lost Gardens of Heligan, Lost Oasis (artist's render pictured above) will features a series of carefully crafted timber structures and treehouses alongside equally appealing planting. It will offer rotating chef residencies from the likes of Nathan Outlaw, major sporting screenings including the football World Cup, Wimbledon and the Formula 1 British Grand Prix, as well as live music and comedy festival.

“The timber structures will feel as though they have grown out of the landscape, wrapped in living planting and built to tread lightly on their surroundings, bringing a true sense of the wild into the heart of London," said Andy Payne, Blue Forest founder.

It will run June 10 to August 30 and Shedworking is planning to report back from its press opening evening next Tuesday.

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

 

The Composer's Cabin: Chelsea Flower Show 2026

 

We're starting our annual look at the best shedlike atmospheres at RHS Chelsea Flower Show with The Composer’s Cabin designed by Martha Krempel and sponsored by London St Pancras Highspeed. 

It's one of the Houseplant Studios sponsored by Malvern Garden Buildings and aims to celebrate peatlands, wild boulder-studded moorlands, horticulture and music as well as garden offices. The cabin is set in a landscape inspired by West Cornwall and features subtropical planting that flourishes in the area. Here's what the RHS says about it:

Inside the cabin, whose quiet charm recalls a 17th century cottage, visitors encounter a Steinway baby grand piano surrounded by lush planting. An immersive soundscape evokes the unique acoustics of peat bogs, bringing this fragile habitat to life. On the roof are transplanted sections of peatland bog, with delicate sphagnum mosses and Eriophorum angustifolium (cotton grass). The result is a retreat where creativity is not imposed upon nature but composed in quiet dialogue with it.

The peatland planting will be returned to its natural habitat and a version of The Composer’s Cabin will be relocated to London St Pancras Station for a pop-up experience in June.

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Wednesday posts are sponsored by Booths Garden Studios, the UK's No.1 supplier of zero maintenance and portable garden studios

 

Garden office music studio

Here is the Rubicon Garden Rooms office and rehearsal studio for Radiohead tribute band, Just Radiohead (pictured with Rubicon's Managing Director John Lyon)

It's a bespoke, sound-proofed music studio, with insulated glass installed in the back garden of band member Shaun on the Wirral who also uses it as a home office for his day job running a motivational speaker and leadership management training company. Rather than convert a large garage, they went down the shedworking route.
 
“Having the studio has made a huge difference to the band," said Shaun, "because it can be quite expensive to hire a rehearsal space, so we’re saving a lot of money doing that. It also means we don’t have to move our equipment so much."

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Wednesday posts are sponsored by Booths Garden Studios, the UK's No.1 supplier of zero maintenance and portable garden studios

 

Garden office and music room

An example here of Green Retreat's Basebox model for a customer who wanted a 3.5m x 2.44m office room which could also double as extra space for leisure and hobbies. Here's what the client says about it:

“It’s a space where I can take time for myself. The great thing about having a garden room is that it’s really helped me manage my workload, hobbies and home life in a healthy way. As someone who works from home, it’s hard to switch off sometimes, and my garden room certainly helps me with that. Before, I used to work around the house, either on the sofa or dining room table. It wasn’t conducive to a productive working day. Now I just pop down the garden and work from there!"

He also uses it work on songs which he plays with his band. "Having a garden room has really facilitated my creative process because while I primarily use it as an office space, it doubles up as a practise room to jam in.”

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Monday's posts are sponsored by Smart Modular Buildings, the UK's best garden room company

 

Garden office music room

Music rooms seem to be growing in popularity as garden office buildings. Here's an impressive recent build from Garden Spaces measuring 4m x 3.5m with an internal height of 2.1m. Since it is to be used by a keen drummer, acoustic performance was key to prevent annoying neighbours. So to maximise the acoustic performance, they included a special external porch entry system incorporating an internal acoustic door to give best performance. The build also has surface mounted sockets and switches to maximise the acoustic performance, and strip lights to maximise acoustic performance.

Other features include:

• Platinum Acoustic enhancement package for all walls, floor and ceiling
• Internal acoustic door
• Acoustic vent
• External uPVC 900mm wide single door with acoustic glazing
• 1250mm long screw pile foundation with adjuster plates due to tree roots in the vicinity and which future proofs the project from potential soil movement
• Thermowood external cladding to two sides
• Laminate flooring - Smoked Oak

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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.

 
 
 

 

Goodbye to the Ladybird shed

Shedworking was a bit sad to hear from Helen Day who runs the remarkable website devoted to Ladybird books and their contributors Ladybird Fly Away Home that she is also moving to a new home and leaving her shed behind her.

We interviewed her on this site nearly a decade ago when we found out that she kept her collection in a secondhand shed bought from a local garden centre, co-incidentally just up the road from Shedworking HQ. She has written a nice farewell on her site which is well worth reading and where you'll find lots of marvellous photos, but here's a snippet:

My bookshed soon became my haven. Picture me with a big box of books to sort out, a steaming cup of tea and my music on shuffle. That was my happy place – where time stood still. And can you imagine what a blessing it was over lockdown?... But mostly it was a place where I was alone with my tea and my music and my head and my books. In wet weather it was a treat to put on the heater and the lights, make the tea and head down the path towards the orange glow from the window, for an hour or two of book therapy.

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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.

Garden Rooms vs Extensions

People often weigh up the pros and cons of a garden room against an extension. While it's obvious which side Shedworking sits on for this debate, we asked the fine folk at Cosy Garden Rooms for their expert thoughts.

There is no structural reason that anything you do in a brick-and-mortar home can’t also be done in a well-built garden room.

Annual data from the price comparison site Reallymoving shows the average cost of moving is now more than £14,000. You’ll need to pay upfront fees, stamp duty and legal expenses. There are also costs closer to your moving date, including removal vans, packing materials and cleaning. Plus, many homeowners love their home, its location, the family is settled at work, in school; so many people choose to extend their home rather than move.

Some of the most popular ways to extend your home include building a conservatory, a loft conversion, garage conversion, an extension or garden room. 

A garden room is a building that is detached from the main home in your garden but is built to high standards; this includes full insulation, electricity, lighting, windows, doors, etc. that provides a fully insulated comfortable living space that can be used all year round; it is not a summer house or posh shed.
The first thing to decide is what do you need extra space for? 

If you are looking for a quiet area away from the distractions of the main home, a garden room could be the perfect solution; an office or work space, a room for the kids, an artist studio, somewhere to operate your business from, a gym, a music room, a games room. The beauty of garden rooms is that they are extremely versatile, flexible spaces. If you are looking for a larger kitchen or more bedrooms and bathrooms a built extension is likely to be a better option.

Image courtesy Cosy Garden Rooms.

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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.

Shou Sugi Bangers music studio

This is the tremendous exterior to the Shou Sugi Bangers music studio designed by Unknown Works, a charred and scalloped accoya music recording studio in Peckham, London, for a major London-based producer. As you know, we are suckers for anything remotely underground and this is semi-sunken. Here's what Unknown Works say about it:⁠

The building utilises a carefully designed set of CNC-milled larch panels, textured at both a macro and micro level, to create a variety of soundscapes across its facade; a reflection of the hyper controlled acoustic environment on the inside. A gradient of concave to smooth surfaces help either augment or mitigate the collection of sounds from the surrounding garden. ⁠
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Built as a 'room within a room', the interior of the studio is designed as a meditative space, naturally lit by a singular, acoustically attenuated oculus above. The room is 'tuned' by a series of acoustic baffles and bass traps that eliminate reverb and ensure a perfectly balanced audio environment. ⁠

Head over to dezeen for lots more marvellous photos of it by Lorenzo Zandri.

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Malvern Garden Buildings offer a premium collection of garden buildings, displayed at 11 UK showsites.

 

Music room with acoustic slatted panels

 

Another recent build from Garden Spaces,  this one an interesting combination of work by supplier and client since it is a music room with acoustic slatted panels installed by the new owner (who says he loves playing saxophone at 7am and not annoying the neighbours). It comes in at 3.95m x 3.5m x 2.15m with a foundation of incremental packers, the existing slab extended to accommodate them. Other features include:

 

* platinum acoustic package with acoustic porch

 

* on the walls, acoustic wool, acoustic plasterboard followed by a acoustic rubber membrane  and then another level of acoustic plasterboard

 

* on the ceiling ceiling, acoustic rubber membrane, resilient bars on it followed by a level of acoustic plasterboards

 

* on the floor, three layer acoustic underlay mat with perimeter flanking band around the perimeter with a laminate 12mm floor on top of it

 

* on the porch - glass doors both externally and internally* aluminium venetian blinds, thermowood cladding oiled with Danish oil, flat rubber roof, air conditioning unit with smart climate controller

 

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Monday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, contemporary living spaces offering premium quality, bespoke buildings without the hefty price tag.

Plankbridge Bothy at Chelsea Flower Show

One of the garden buildings you're going to see a lot of in the media coverage of this year's Chelsea Flower Show is the RHS Bothy from Plankbridge (almost inevitably described as 'covetable' by many journalists). The new design is a collaboration between the two and is launched in the middle of the Great Pavilion, "perfect as a home office, garden retreat, music room or art studio" according to the RHS.

It's part of the ‘Women in Hortculture’ displayand  is made entirely in home-grown UK timber, with sweet chestnut windows, door and internal wall lining, a potting bench-inspired desk made from ash, and an ash floor with a neutral ash finish. Details include replicas of Gertrude Jekyll motif sketches housed in the RHS Lindley Library Collections, desk brackets forged over Dorset charcoal which were based on the boot scraper outside RHS Wisley's Arts & Crafts Old Laboratory, and the whole thing is painted in Farrow and Ball's Brinjal.

Alos look out for Plankbridge's tradestand AR 640  in Ranelagh Gardens.

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Monday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, contemporary living spaces offering premium quality, bespoke buildings without the hefty price tag

 

Garden office music room

 

The latest build from Garden Spaces, a music room/recording studio with acoustic porch which measures 4.5m x 3.45m x 2.5m.

Special features include:

- UPVC single doors leading to the acoustic porch

- acoustic solid door with acoustic drop down seal, threshold seal and acoustic perimeter seal -  UPVC acoustic double skinned and double glazed fixed window

- external finish in our old friend Western red cedar treated with danish oil to stop the silvering process due to UV degradation

- composite decking with step in Charcoal Black

- flat EPDM roof with aluminium roof trims

- condenserless aircon 

- acoustic vent

No planning or building consent was required.

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SMART designs and manufactures industry leading garden rooms from our very own Suffolk factory and installed all over mainland UK

Green Man Cottage

 

Sussex-based Andrew Paine Architecture designed and built their own garden office premises, a marvellous shedworking space which has just made the 2023 RIBA South East Awards shortlist.

It's a fascinating space, constructed almost entirely using offcuts of timber from local building sites, a demolition site in East London and waste timber from the Mid Sussex Wood Recycling Project. The only major new elements are aluminium-framed double-glazed doors and sanitaryware.

Highlights of the build include:

• No concrete or cement used, including in the foundations
• Natural wood fibre insulation
  
• The garden office placed to make best use of passive solar heating and lightin
• All lighting low-energy LED
• Rainwater harvesting system

Here's what they say about it:

"The result is a warm, open place to work which also doubles as a music rehearsal room and a space for the occasional overnight guest through the use of folding office furniture. While we are aware that there are a large number of proprietary garden rooms now available, we hope that this experimental building offers a little more both to the user and the environment."

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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.

 

Garden music room

A recent build from Garden Spaces, a garden music room with acoustic porch in Hampshire, measuring 4.5m x 4.4m x 2.5m. Special features include:

* aluminium single doors with acoustic glazing colour leading to the acoustic porch

* acoustic solid door with acoustic drop down seal, threshold seal and acoustic perimeter seal 

* acoustic double skinned and double glazed fixed window

* thermowood cladding (kiln dried & secret fix) painted with wood stain ebony oil

* composite decking with step in Charcoal Black

* Flat EPDM roof with aluminium roof trims

* wall heater with smart control

* acoustic vent

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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

 

Shepherd’s hut garden office

Shepherds' huts make great garden offices, despite David Cameron slightly tarnishing the idea by buying one himself in which to write his memoirs. Richare Lee from Plankbridge (who didn't supply the former Prime Minister's hut), has a nice little piece on their site on the subject of shedworking in a shepherd's hut. Here's a snippet:

When you are free to cordon off designated time and space for your work, it’s easier to enjoy leisure with more pleasure. There’s a lot to be said for that – not least in an era where striving for work-life balance can sometimes feel like cycling a tightrope.

“After we bought the hut, which I use primarily for my work, the list of uses for the hut expanded rapidly,”explains Gwennie of her multifunctional hut space. “It offers additional guest space as the single bench bed can be opened out into a double bed for family and friends when they come to stay. And when the children were growing up they used it for music practice and exam revision. We have even celebrated New Year in it!”

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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.