Paint it black

London-based garden office builder Paul Winters has been in touch to offer a succinct piece of advice: paint it black.

"I've been building garden offices and studios for about four years," he says, "and I have found that people round here really like it when I paint or stain them black. The building seems to blend in really well when it's black and it really shows off the greenery and colours of the garden."

As evidence for his claim, pictured above is a garden office built by Paul in High Barnet and fitted out with filing cabinets and storage units - he has stained the cedar cladding black and the flooring is Black Oak engineered board ----------------------------------------------------------

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

The end of the black shed?

Interesting thoughts on this question from Christopher Hodge who runs Shackadelic in an interview with The Times ('How posh is your shed?'). Here's the snippet:

So what next in the evolution of the super hut? Hodge predicts the end of the black shack. Most current clients tend to opt for a black painted exterior, a look that Hodge says will soon look outdated. “For me, peak painting of the shed black was probably a couple of years ago. I’m trying to convince people to be a bit more colourful. I’ve been experimenting with old lime rendering techniques and tiles and Japanese carpentry, weaving bamboo, things like that. Currently I’m really into folk art and I’m working on folk stencils.” 

Picture courtesy Shackadelic of a 7.7m x 3.4m guest house project with painted larch exterior cladding, corrugated onduline roof, with French doors and two skylights.

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Black garden office

Black garden offices were all the rage a couple of years ago and while some of the heat has gone out of the 'influencers' gushing over them, they're still very popular. Here's a fine example from Ayr Cabins, a decent sized 7m x 2.8m in their Cresswell range. It's clad in matt black stained timber on the outside, with birch-faced ply on the inside. This particular build includes a kitchenette and lavatory, as well as large sliding doors. 

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Sculptor's garden room

A cleverly designed garden room by Green Retreats for a client who retired three years ago. "After many years working in London and not having much time for his craft, our client decided it was time to pick up the old hobby once again," explained Steph Antoniades from Green Retreats. "Initially he shared a space in his home with his wife, who is a hobbyist seamstress but this soon became impractical as they both required space. Our client also couldn’t feasibly practice sculpting in his home, for fear of making a mess."

The answer was this 4m x 2.5m garden room in composite black, the black cladding matching the client's awardwinning home which is also clad in black, allowing the garden room to blend well with the house. Features include a 2.3m sliding door with a screen window to the left to allow as much light in as possible. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Black Urban Grow Pod

I wrote in the most recent issue of the Idler magazine about how black has become a popular colour for garden offices. Here's the Urban Grow Pod from Obe & Co, a design practise with its own industrial workshop facility which produces many non-garden office products too. An interesting part of its design is the curved aluminium roof, plus there is eco-friendly sheep wool insulation.

Below is what a non-black pod looks like.

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Black timber garden studio + model-making workshop

Here's a marvellous double shedworking construction by Rodic Davidson Architects in Cambridge. Here's what they say about it:

Hidden in amongst the trees at the end of a long garden, we have designed and built two separate timber-framed buildings for use as a home office/studio and a model-making workshop. The structures are clad in vertical black-stained softwood boarding of varying widths – wider on the studio and narrower on the workshop. On the studio, the cladding forms a continuous rainscreen and wraps the entire building. The larger studio building is very highly insulated (using 150mm Cellotex combined with Super Tri-Iso) and incorporates a super efficient air-source heat pump. Calculations indicate that the annual heating bill will cost less than £21 in electricity costs. The building is wrapped with a black timber rain screen over a complete wrapper of a rubber membrane for water-proofing.

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Black still the new black for garden offices

Further proof that black is still very much in when it comes to choosing a colour for your garden office. Here's a modular HOM3 cabin recently erected in Kensington by Business Interior Solutions as a dual garden office and art studio. 

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

Garden studio clad in Gendai Yakisugi

 

 

A black exterior on garden offices was once a major trend but now it has become fairly common. However there is black exterior and black exterior and one way of doing it is provided by this garden studio designed and built by Nakamoto Forestry Europe.  It's done using a 'Gendai Yakisugi' technique, charred and then brushed. Here's what they say about it:

"Gendai is our most popular Yakisugi (brushed Shou Sugi Ban) surface for exterior applications. A single pass through the brush machine knocks down the heavy soot layer and leaves a smooth, silky look. The burnt fibre crevasse shadows are subtle, and Gendai can either be installed without oil prefinish, with a traditional oil prefinish, or with a water-based oil prefinish depending on the appearance or colour desired."

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Black garden office

Black is a surprisingly popular choice among shedworkers (and professional garden designers) for their exterior garden office colour. Here's a particular nice example from Sussex-based Urban Escape Studios which is almost hidden in the corner of the clients' garden. It's one from their Astana range, 4m x 2.5m, with dark grey aluminium French doors, full length picture window, and cladding which was stained with Black Ash to blend into the greenery.
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Friday posts are sponsored by Warwick Buildings, manufacturers of outstanding quality timber buildings. Click here for more information.

Dark Matter garden studio

 

 

This stunning garden office (called Dark Matter) in Tring, Hertfordshire, for a design recruitment consultant comes from architects Hyperspace who describe its exterior as "a scaly biodiverse façade". Like yesterday's post, it's actually a reworking of a former garage into a 40m2 studio, rectangular with one corner chopped off. Indeed, Hyperspace has commendably managed to hang on to and reuse 95% of the structure.

The 850 larch scales on the exterior are arranged in a grid pattern and chamfered at 15 degrees to provide homing opportunities for insects and spiders. And while inside there are white oiled timber rafters and light poplar plywood panels, its charred black appearance only confirms that black is very much back in the garden office world. Also worth a mention are the centrally pivoting door, and the two light chimneys. Lots more photos at the link above and at their instagram page.

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

Nordic noir shedworking

With the new series of The Killing gripping the UK, garden2office has been busy paying homage to another Swedish icon, the Black Barn, designed by Stockholm architects Pinc Hus. The 30sq m studio will be used for interior design classes and features a wood burning stove, Swedish galvinised steel roof, 3.6m sliding doors and the company's unique closed panel insulated wall units with matt black feather edge cladding. Reindeer-pattern jumpers come as optional extras. -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists. Click here for more details.

Garden office + Garden gym

An interesting recent build from Garden Spaces, a garden gym built in an L shape squeezed alongside an existing garden office. It comes in at 4.75m x 2.9m and to support the weight of gym equipment a small concrete pad was created. Extra plywood was attached to the walls to accommodate other gym equipment as per the client's spec. 

 

Other features include:

- screw pile foundation

- French aluminium door

- small composite decking area at the front in Charcoal Black colour

- a rubber gym floor roll, black with blue specks

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Box of Delights - home office pods

Two delightful shedworking boxes today. First the Eclipse Desk by Marcus Ward Curran which includes a desk, a chair, a hooded pod, speakers and wheels. This great video below shows it in all its glory.Or how about the Battle-Rig Pro (above) from Master Rig which comes in red and black, or silver and black. It's aimed at gamers but you could work at it too. According to their site, they're working on a specific office rig which should be available soon.

Via Yanko Design and Trendhunter

Shed art: Nathaniel Rackowe

Nathaniel Rackowe's Black Shed and Black Shed Expanded. Sculptures in steel scaffolding, timber, bitumen, paint and fluorescent light. h: 350 x w: 350 x d: 250 cm / h: 137.8 x w: 137.8 x d: 98.4 in.
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