There’s no doubt about it, fully insulated garden rooms give you all the things that a traditional extension can achieve. They offer you extra floorspace you do not already have, whether that be for a garden office, a family room, entertaining space, hobby room or a small home business. Plus, with today’s build quality, they offer virtually the same, if not better, thermal retention.

Garden rooms are absolutely a sound investment if you compare them to the cost of a traditional extension, but do they add value to your property?

The short answer is, yes. A fully insulated modern garden room will almost certainly pique the interest of potential buyers. Why? Because you’re effectively giving them an extra space that they wouldn’t necessarily get with another property, making your home more saleable.

How does a Garden Room add Value?

There are lots of ways that a garden room can add value to your existing property. It may be, for example, that you have a sizeable back garden but not a dedicated office inside your home. Or perhaps you have a small lounge/diner and want a bigger purpose-built space to entertain guests. The point is that a garden room can add much-needed square footage, and therefore, value. So, let’s explore how.

Appealing to Remote Workers  

Over the past three years there has been a huge shift in how we work. Just this February, the ONS reported that 84% of office workers plan on permanently blending home and office working.

With demand as it is, adding a garden office to your home will certainly not be a wasted investment. For example, if there was another house of the same size for sale in your street and the only difference was that you had a garden room, you’d almost certainly sell yours first, and quite possibly for more money

Giving Buyers more Choice

If there’s one main advantage, besides cost, that a garden room has over a traditional extension, it has got to be versatility. Usually, a home extension serves one purpose – such as a kitchen extension or a larger lounge. On the other hand, a garden room can be almost anything that the buyer wants it to be. So before they even cross your threshold, they’ll have checked out images on Rightmove and be thinking about how they could use the space.

If you think about it, a garden room can also make your interior space more appealing. A remote worker, for example, won’t need to free up a bedroom for their office, and someone looking for occasional entertaining space won’t need to extend. Instead of problems, your property offers opportunities.

Less Expensive to Run

Despite the government’s energy price cap, electricity and gas prices remain a big factor for buyers. A fully insulated garden room is a big plus point if a buyer plans on working from home. Most of the year, they won’t need to turn the heating on at all, but if they do, there won’t be any wastage as they’ll only be heating the space they need to. This alone can be a huge selling point.

Cheaper than Building

Building costs are continuing to rise at a much sharper rate than modern garden rooms. According to Rightmove, the average extension costs between £1,500 and £2,300 per m2, and 30% higher in London – that’s over £35,000 for a 4 x4 m2 extension. For comparison, even our most expensive modern garden room, the Ultra (pictured), comes in at £26,720, giving you a healthy saving for other home improvements.

 

You must keep in mind that these are just indicative prices, though, as building costs can vary. Plus, and this really is a big plus, you won’t need to go through the dreaded planning permission process in the vast majority of garden room installation projects.

Outdoor Space is becoming more Important

If there’s one thing that’s changed forever over the last couple of years, it’s our love of the outdoors. In a recent Honda-commissioned poll of 2,000 adults, 57 per cent of Britons said that they would pay more for a property with a nicely designed garden.

Just imagine what would happen if you had a beautifully designed garden with a purpose-built garden room from which to enjoy it. Buyers would go mad!

Plus, from a practical point of view, a carefully positioned garden room can completely transform an otherwise redundant garden space into quite an oasis.

Take the owners of this modest but perfectly sized Belle garden office painted in Island Breeze. This 3.2m x 2.1m garden room fits snuggly into what was previously an unused part of the garden.

 

How much Value does a Garden Room really add?

It’s difficult to give an exact figure, but new research by Ideal Home reveals that a fully insulated garden room can add as much as 1.5 x its cost to the value of your home.  This is hardly surprising, especially with how many millions of dining tables and bedrooms would have been lost to the home office.

As with any home improvement, how much value you add to your existing property comes down to making a few clever design choices. So, with a modern garden room, you’ll want to choose one that is:

• Genuinely useable in all weathers
• Constructed using high-quality materials and fully insulated for excellent thermal retention
• Specified with high-quality PVCu windows and doors
• Placed in the right position to make the best use of natural light
• Flexible in its design choices (allowing you to choose where you’d like to place your windows and doors)

Thankfully, SMART Garden Offices offers all the above and more. With seven ranges to choose from, in over 60 different sizes, the best place to start is by requesting a SMART brochure.  A full colour, 50-page brochure packed full of information, images and inspiration.

Once you’ve settled on your favourite range, you can see exactly how they will suit your garden using the SMART configurator.

Easy to use, the configurator gives you complete flexibility over your design. You decide where you wish to place the doors and windows and the interior finish you’d like.

Once you’re happy with what you’ve created, you can road test your design with our AR Visualiser App that allows you to drop your 3D garden room into your outside space using your mobile phone lens.

The best part about having the freedom to design your garden room in this way is that you have complete control to design your perfect space.