New Annexe Spaces website goes live

Annexe Spaces has totally revamped its website and, in the nicest possible way, we think it's a definite  improvement over the old site - it's attractive, easy to navigate, and has clear pricing levels. This is a market that is still growing and the company certainly has an excellent offering, with all buildings designed and made to order for installation across much of England and some areas of Wales. 

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Welcome to your new teak garden room from Moonalabs. Unparalleled quality at an affordable price.

 

 

Garden art studio

A rather nice 3m x 6m bespoke build by Eden Garden Rooms for a couple in Ramsgate, Kent, who use it as a garden office for a mosaic, painting and drawing business. Key features include a design with extra vertical windows which allows plenty of light in, top notch insulation for year-round use, aluminium-framed French doors, and premium cedar cladding.

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

The Apothecary's Den featured in the new Idler

 

 

The latest issue of the Idler magazine is out now. In my regular column on sheds I focus on the remarkable The Apothecary's Den which is a strong contender for this year's Shed of the Year competition. And in the same issue I've also written a piece on Maya Angelou on her soothing approach to the craft of writing, adapted from my latest book Rooms of Their Own (with illustration as always by James Oses). A subscription is always the way forward!

 

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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.

Spaceship Micro Garden Office

 

While there will always be a demand for a large garden office, there seems to be a gentle but noticeable trend towards smaller models over the last couple of years. This is one of the smallest we've seen, the Spaceship Micro Garden Office from Dunster House which comes in at 1.4m wide by 2m deep by a smidgeon over 2m high. It's built from what Dunster callas "a maintenance-free exterior wall surface" made using WPC (wood-plastic composite) with a uPVC door and MDF walls. It's a DIY job with an " easy-to-assemble panel system design". It may not be the most luxurious garden office on the market but it does retail at a wallet-friendly £2,464.99.

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Wednesday’s posts are sponsored by Norwegian Log Buildings  - Log cabins and garden buildings for a better quality of life. Click here for more details.

 

Joiners wanted for Scottish garden office company

Outside In Garden Rooms are looking for joiners for their Glasgow and Edinburgh operations. In Glasgow they're after a Lead Joiner, on PAYE with holiday pay and pension contributions, 1st and 2nd fix experience ideal as the job involves all aspects of garden room construction. Salary from £35,000 depending on experience. And in Edinburgh a joiner, with applications welcome from people with experience but not fully qualified or final year apprentices who need some support with relevant training. Salary for this from £28,000 (again depending on experience). More details on both roles here.

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  Tuesday posts are sponsored by Garden Spaces, suppliers of                     contemporary garden buildings, offices, gyms and studios, many of 

  which do not require planning

Henry David Thoreau moves into his cabin at Walden Pond #onthisday 1845

Not all notable works of architecture are on a grand scale or include trailblazing features. One shedlike building that has had a longlasting impact on society is the one room cabin which writer, philospher, and father of Shedworking, Henry David Thoreau (1817 –1862) built at Walden Pond, Concord and lived in for the following two years. He deliberately chose Independence Day to begin his experiment. 

 “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Thoreau wanted to experiment with cutting himself off from the everyday life of Concord in order to discover the inner truths of being. His cabin lifestyle was relatively cheap and he lived simply so that earning money could become a less important part of his life. It also gave him a spiritual retreat in which to be alone with his thoughts (as well as a place to work). Here's a snippet: 

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself… I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it.

The book received a mixed reception on its publication in 1854, but in more recent times has become a key text in the environmental movement and even regarded as an example of performance art. “A century and a half after its publication,” wrote novelist John Updike in his introduction to the 150th anniversary of the book, “Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.” 

The cabin is no longer standing although a replica has been erected close to its original location.

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Monday posts are sponsored by Eden Garden Rooms. Stunning, bespoke high quality garden rooms, to suit your unique space and style

Mark Twain in Rooms of Their Own

Mark Twain's octagonal writing shed is among the several such structures featured in my latest book Rooms of Their Own. Here's the section, with illustrations from the book by James Oses:

Like most writers, Mark Twain preferred to work in the peace of his own sanctuary, but in his case he also mixed business with pleasure by writing in the same room as the billiard table on which he spent many happy hours playing by himself and with friends. “It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry,” he wrote to his Edinburgh-based friend Dr John Brown in September 1874, “So I knocked off, and went to playing billiards for a change.”

This billiard/writing room was on the top floor of his three-storey redbrick house in Hartford, Connectict. Although light and roomy with plenty of windows, Twain wrote at a desk facing a wall to minimise distractions (the urban view now would have been a far lovelier rural one in his day). Next to his desk, usually fairly cluttered with papers, was a shelving unit with various compartments where he kept his drafts. He used the billiard table to spread out his manuscripts before editing them.

Twain also wrote in an octagonal shed built in 1874 at Quarry Farm, in Elmira, upstate New York, at the home of his sister-in-law Susan Crane. Here he would begin work after a hearty breakfast and stay inside, usually missing lunch, writing and smoking cigars until 5pm. Family and friends did not disturb him, blowing a horn to get his attention if he was needed up at the main house. While his home in Hartford was something of a magnet for the literary world, his shed in Elmira where he worked every summer for two decades was a peaceful spot with far less going on.

“Susie Crane has built me the loveliest study you ever saw,” he wrote to Reverend Joseph Twichell and his wife Harmony back in Hartford. “It is octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window and it sits perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cosy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lighting flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head—imagine the luxury of it.”

The study was 100 yards away from the house and about 12ft wide with cat flaps to allow his favourite pets to come in and out while he was writing. It had a brick fireplace and a desk but was not richly decorated inside. It has been likened to the kind of pilot house on riverboats in which Twain worked as a young man and wrote about in his memoir Life on the Mississippi. “On hot days” he wrote to Dr Brown, “I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats and write in the midst of the hurricanes, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of…It is remote from all noises.”

Novelist John Steinbeck was one who agreed on the loveliness of Twain’s sanctuary, using it as inspiration for his own hexagonal writing shed which he named ‘Joyous Garde.

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Welcome to your new teak garden room from Moonalabs. Unparalleled quality at an affordable price.