Cotsmill Avant Garde

Cotsmill Garden Offices have extended their flat roofed range with the Avant Garde. Designed to be planning permission friendly with a greater depth than width the Avant Garde continues Cotsmill Garden Offices improvements such as the move to an EPDM rubberised roofing system that has a life span of up to 50 years and the option of uPVC doors and windows. Cotsmill still offer cladding types including Thermowood, Cedar, Redwood and Weatherboard and an optional engineered pad based foundation system. Cotsmill plant two trees for every building manufactured as part of its environmental policy, an industry first.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday posts are sponsored by Atelier garden studios which are sustainable, stylish, flexible, functional and future proofed

Craftedspace

Craftedspace is a collective of designers who create handmade buildings. Among their intriguing designs is the traditional green oak garden room with a view to the sea pictured above for Kay and Jeff Zitron in Wales: the goal was to create a framework over two levels that would be quickly overgrown with tunnels and bowers of wisteria and clematis. There is also a large deck area specifically built for use as an outdoor office (and from which the sand dunes can be seen).

We also rather like Caradoc's Hideout, pictured below, a space for everyday climbing and playing as well as for local legend storytelling.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday posts are sponsored by The Stable Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here.

Tent: shedworkers

Branding, design and marketing agency Tent is has recently become a shed-based branding, design and marketing agency as its business development director Sarah Raad explains below - it's quite a long post but full of interesting detail whether you're already a shedworker or considering becoming one:

We had been based in an excellent business centre in town for five years but when we decided to make the move to a slightly more rural setting for our home, we thought it made sense to cut down the commute and improve our work/life balance by building an office garden. The houses in our village all have long, allotment style gardens, designed for feeding the families of pit workers who lived there years ago and now perfect for putting an office at the bottom. And so The Shed as we have named it was born!

We needed planning permission from the local council as technically it’s in the front garden of the house and also because the village is a conversation area, the council’s conservation department had the opportunity to look and comment on the style etc. Luckily this all went through without too many issues.

We bought a kit from Dunster House and employed a local builder, electrician and IT company to construct it and wire us up to the 21st century complete with phone lines, broadband and wifi.

Inside we have worked with our current brand in terms of colours and overall look – we even have fake turf instead of carpet – bringing the outdoors inside! It is such a creative environment to be in, very quiet, just the sound of birds and the occasional car crunching down the lane.

Clients love it, it’s so inviting and cosy and a nice break from the hustle and bustle of town and city. It’s also proving to be an excellent space for us to run one to one marketing planning and training sessions as it’s so peaceful and a bit of an escape from people’s everyday business environments. And even though we’re tucked away we are only 20 mins or so from the centre of town and not that far from the A1.

We decided to heat it by using a wood burner, although we burn smokeless fuel. The Shed is so well insulated though that even on a fairly cold winter’s day we only needed the burner going for 4 hours and then it was warm for the rest of the day and into the evening. With summer approaching we are looking forward to flinging open the double doors and really getting the feeling or working in the garden.

Working where we live has really improved our work/life balance and means we can be responsive to our client’s needs when needs be without compromising on family life. Working in our shed means that we can lock the door on work at the end of the day too rather than bringing it into the house which is important to us.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday posts are sponsored by The Home Office Company, manufacturers of unique garden rooms since 1998. Now in 10 exciting new colours. Click here for more details.

Deborah Nagan: How green is your garden?

Deborah Nagan’s latest shed-based work (we've covered her previously here) is called 'How Green is your Garden?' and has been on display at at Canada Blooms, the country’s largest flower expo. Deborah's installation includes five sheds (complete with individual garden areas) and aims to examine how we think about our gardens and their impact on the environment in terms of chemicals, pesticides and general rubbish. Here's what she says about it:

This is a hybrid of my garden for the Metis International Festival held in Quebec in the summer  each year and questions the so-called sustainability of domestic gardens.  The only plants are white tulips wrapped in paper with messages left by visitors to the garden in Metis – otherwist, visitors will have to make sense of charcoal, salt, blue tape, glass.

This garden was put together with the assistance of Landscape Ontario and sponsored by Le Groupe Germain.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday posts are sponsored by The Home Office Company, manufacturers of unique garden rooms since 1998. Now in 10 exciting new colours. Click here for more details.

Start Up Britain

A big welcome to the many new visitors to the site if you've just discovered Shedworking via Start Up Britain. Please do have a browse around and feel more than free to get in touch or leave a comment. If you're not sure what Start Up Britain is then here's some blurb:

StartUp Britain is a new campaign by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, launched on 28th March 2011. Designed to celebrate, inspire and accelerate enterprise in the UK, it has the full backing of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and HM Government. This is a response from the private sector to the Government’s call for an ‘enterprise-led’ recovery. We believe that many of the important functions and services necessary to foster and champion new enterprise can be open-sourced, instead of provided by government directly. We aim to do this by creating a living market-place online for the wide range of enterprise support that is already available.

Regular readers will recognise that Emma Jones of Enterprise Nation is one of the chief organisers.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

French 'garden office'

A remarkable garden office in Paris, designed by Christian Pottgiesser for two companies, Pons and Huot: the former industrial workshop now has not only a self-cleaning glass roof and individual plexiglass-domed work areas but as you can see from the photos, a spectacular collection of Ficus-Panda trees.

Via Treehugger

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

Barnworking

A lovely shedworking atmosphere in Weybridge, Surrey, an American-style barn/garden studio by Mark Burton Construction (and here) which includes all the heating, lighting and power you'd expect plus plenty of windows to bring in natural light and a door within a huge door.
---------------------------------------------------------------

Create energy, create space, go solar with energyspace solar garden buildings. Click here for more details