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794 Leesville Road | Lynchburg, VA 24502

A happy place

Garden rooms are trending in home design. For those working remotely, home offices and workout rooms are house-hunting must haves. In a COVID world, indoor-outdoor living and entertaining are not only a gracious lifestyle but essential to staying healthy.

For Alicia Smith, vice president of F&S Building Innovations, the greenery, natural wood furnishings and light in garden rooms inspire and relax. She says, “My happy place is out in the sunshine. A lot of times, garden rooms incorporate a lot of natural elements, wood and greenery. Greenery itself is relaxing and peaceful. It’s a great way to start your day and wind down your day.”

Inspiring history

You can create a garden room in your home or as a freestanding structure connected by pathways to the house. Your personality, your home’s décor and your budget will guide your decision. A garden room house extension costs more than a stand-alone one and typically requires planning commission approval but a free-standing structure may not, depending on your locality. Both can raise the resale value of your home as they increase your home’s usable space.

Home extension garden rooms — sunrooms, orangeries and conservatories — enjoy a rich architectural history, writes art historian Lynn Byrne in her article “Garden Rooms, Then and Now” in Interior Design

Introduced in Renaissance Italy, orangeries were initially greenhouses where the affluent cultivated citrus trees ripened by the sun rather than importing their fruit from the Mediterranean. Glass conservatories or “crystal palaces” prevailed in grand Victorian homes and gardens. The New York Botanical Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is the apotheosis of a Victorianstyle crystal palace. With the introduction of furnishings, glass greenhouses pivoted to comfortable garden rooms.