With tailor-made garden room designs, we not only personalise the size and shape of your studio, including its doors, windows and aesthetics, but we can also add other embellishments to make it personal to you – including on the roof!
Living meadow and wildflower roofs are blossoming in popularity, as they not only look lovely (helping your cedar-clad garden room blend with its surroundings) but are also a good way to promote biodiversity in your garden, and are a haven for wildlife, particularly for the lovely bees that have such a big impact on our environment and daily lives. In fact, bees are so important to our ecosystem that we couldn’t survive without them!
We have recently installed a beautiful wildflower roof in a garden room in London, which features some other quirky additions from our creative clients! This customer came to us following a recommendation from a friend for a reliable and skilled garden room supplier in Kent. They were looking to create a garden office combined with workshop and hobby space.
This garden room was originally going to feature two separate rooms; one for a home office, and one for a creative workshop, but after working with our designers and considering all the implications on the space, they decided to create one larger multi-functional garden studio, which works for both work and play. This not only solved a problem for now, but it meant that the room was more flexible for how they may wish to use the space in the future, as their requirements may change.
As our client’s home is a three-storey house, which looks down on the garden from the master bedroom, they decided to create an eye-catching roof feature to improve their view, and promote biodiversity in their garden. Based on the core design, this garden room in London didn’t require planning permission as it was built within their Permitted Development Rights. However, due to the wildflower roof, we needed to increase the size of the roof joists and add retaining bars for the turf, which meant that the overall building height eventually needed to be over 2.5m high. This therefore required planning, which was managed from start to finish by eDEN, delivering a successful planning outcome.
Just five weeks after the planning permission was approved, our client has a fully completed room, complete with a living roof which will blossom and grow in time, and featuring another colourful inhabitant which creates a lovely point of interest!
So why are wildflower roofs so great for garden design and the environment?
- We use a substrate which has been designed around a soil-free system, which needs very little care as it is free-draining and guarantees a perfect wildflower environment. You only need to cut it once a year!
- Bees love it! According to Greenpeace, we have bees to thank for one in every three bites of food that we eat, so it’s essential that we keep plenty of pollen-rich, natural areas for them to thrive in. And they don’t mind if it’s on the roof!
- The turf we use is composed of 41 UK native wildflowers and grasses, with a minimum of 50% wildflowers, which means it’s an ideal habitat for a wide range of insects. If you’re keen to bring more biodiversity into your garden, a living roof is a great way of doing this.
- Living roofs also provide an additional layer of insulation, helping to keep your garden room cool in the summer and warm in the winter – the natural way!
- They look beautiful whilst also helping to combat the effects of pollution and making your garden a more ecologically friendly place – what’s not to like!
If you’re interested in creating your own garden room with a living meadow roof, get in touch with our skilled team to discuss your project in more detail 0800 0935 339.
