Garden office drawings that keep you lawful — or get you consent
The 2.5-metre rule catches more London garden rooms than any other. Because most urban gardens are narrow, almost every garden office ends up within 2m of a fence — and at that point the entire structure, ridge and roof furniture included, must stay under 2.5m. Squeezing a decent ceiling height, floor build-up and insulated roof into that envelope is a genuine design problem, and it's where our chartered designers earn their keep: flat or shallow-pitch roofs, dug-in floor slabs and slimline warm-roof build-ups that keep the room usable and the height lawful.
Where your project genuinely needs planning permission — a taller studio, a garden annexe for a relative, an outbuilding in a conservation area or behind an Article 4 direction — we prepare the full householder application: existing and proposed site plans, floor plans, elevations and sections, designed against your council's residential design guidance and its record of recent outbuilding decisions. Councils across London and the Home Counties look hard at garden buildings near boundaries, in back-land gardens and on sloping sites; we design and argue each scheme the way your case officer will assess it.
Even when no permission is needed, most clients ask us for a lawful development certificate. It costs little, and the certificate — issued by the council against our drawings — is formal proof your garden room is lawful. When you sell, your buyer's solicitor will ask for exactly that piece of paper, and 'the builder said it was fine' is not an answer conveyancers accept.
