Have you thought about cladding the internal walls?

We’ve been watching the BBC’s The House That £100k House and whilst the buildings the self builders are creating are on a larger scale than a garden room, it has highlighted a few design tricks that you could use in your garden room designs.

One trick we liked and have indeed seen a few times used by professional garden room designers is to use the same cladding material used on the exterior of the building on a wall inside the garden room.

The presenters on the ‘£100k House’ were encouraging the self builders to try using it to make their room seem bigger. The theory is that by using the same material inside and out you create a visual effect that makes the room seem bigger.

We have mocked up a garden room to illustrate the point. The exterior of the building is clad in cedar. We have extended this along one of the interior walls, using a frameless glazed panel so as not to break the visual line.

The colour of the cedar looks great internally coupled with off white plastered walls. We have not used skirting boards in an attempt to keep the joints as simple as possible – in reality this would also cut down on your costs and a job!

If you decided to create a look like this you would need to consider how the external cedar cladding will weather. Left untreated it will weather to a silver grey over time, this will obviously effect the visual effect that we are trying to create as you will have two different colours. You could preserve the colour by using a UV protector at the time of installation. Each plank needs to be coated before the cladding is installed – this is what many professional garden room designers do to protect their cedar from changing colour.

Cedar is an obvious cladding choice because of its natural durability, but you could obviously create this same effect with other cladding materials – go on be creative!