Garden Pavilion & Outdoor Entertaining Building

Our clients had a beautifully landscaped garden looking out over open Kent countryside, and wanted a permanent building at the end of it: somewhere to cook, eat and sit out in, that would still look right in twenty years. That ruled out a timber garden room straight away.

The brief was for a proper masonry structure, built to the same standard as an extension to the house, with a flat roof, generous openings toward the view and a low-profile shape that would not dominate the garden. It had to be built into an already-finished landscape of porcelain paving, clipped box hedging and mature planting, which meant working carefully and keeping the site tidy from the first day to the last.

We started with a reinforced concrete slab tied into the existing paving levels, with drainage runs and soil pipes set in before the pour so nothing had to be chased in later. A brick plinth was built off the slab to lift the walls clear of the paving and give a crisp, deliberate base line against the porcelain.

The walls are laid in H+H Celcon aircrete blockwork, craned in on a lorry-mounted grab to avoid tracking machinery across the finished garden. Aircrete gives us a fast, accurate wall with far better insulation than dense block, which matters in a building meant for year-round use. A steel beam carries the load over the wide opening to the garden, so the front of the building could be left generously open rather than broken up by piers.

The flat roof is a timber structure fixed to a wall plate bedded on the blockwork, with deep overhangs on two elevations to give shade and shelter to the paving below. Levels were checked continuously against the surrounding paving so the finished building sits properly in the garden rather than perched on top of it.