The Dutch like to be outside, as long as it’s not really outside. Nice in November on a café terrace, but then under a shelter, with patio heaters and a fleece blanket.
We also have ‘outside-but-not-too’ concepts for the home. For years, the conservatory was the ultimate outdoor-but-not-outdoor experience, that delightful legacy of the 1980s entrepreneurial home. But in Vinexlandia and other environments where people have a garden of more than 10 square meters and then start thinking ‘Oh no, all that space and all that greenery, something has to be done with it!’, the conservatory has started to compete with the veranda and the garden room. A veranda is a terrace with a roof and you can turn it into a garden room by placing a glass wall that can be opened.
The glass wall is essential in the garden room, for the ‘connection with the garden’, so that you can have the ‘outdoor feeling’ for twelve months a year, according to the turnover-smelling garden room suppliers on their websites. Also important: the whole must be poorly insulated. That glass wall must have large cracks and good drafts, and the roof and walls must contain zero insulation, because otherwise you have no feeling of being outside. Nice example of rethinking this: ‘No, we don’t have a poorly insulated extension, we have a garden room.’ Which we then covered with patio heaters, because it’s cold.
It becomes even more special when the garden room or veranda is built on the facade of the house. After all, not everyone has enough garden to place the desired gazebo in the backyard. So the veranda or garden room goes against the back wall, which strangely enough already had a glass sliding wall (‘for lots of light and then you bring the outside in, for that outdoor feeling all year round’).
But because of that closed roof of the veranda-cum-garden room, the light output in the house then decreases dramatically, just like your view of your outdoor space. For that you have to sit in the garden room. Brilliant, how the attached garden room degrades the indoor space so much that it increases its own value. The disadvantage of the garden room is that you have a view of less garden from your house, because you have sacrificed half of that to a garden room.
In a good decade, the garden room will be the same curiosity as the sitting pit and the suspended ceiling. Once upon a time there seemed to be sensible arguments for it and we did it en masse, but give it some time and some distance and you will see that such a drafty outdoor space makes no sense. So manufacturers will come up with packages to properly insulate the garden room. After which we will miss the outdoor feeling and will start thinking about a veranda or a garden room. But because we no longer have a garden left, we will go up and create roof gardens on top of our outdoor-outdoor rooms, where you can sit quietly in the green without a roof over your head.
Jasper van Kuijk on Twitter: @jaspervankuijk