A golf room in Broadstone with room for a full driver swing

A single-figure handicap, a garden that backs onto trees, and one non-negotiable: no shortening the swing to fit the building.

Mark plays off 6 and wanted to keep playing through the winter. He’d looked at converting the garage and given up, because at 2.3m it was never going to take a driver. A purpose-built room meant we could set the ceiling around his actual swing rather than the other way round.

A 3.3m internal ceiling on a garden building pushes hard against the 2.5m permitted-development limit near a boundary. We had 4m of clearance on the near side, which let us go higher, but the roof still had to stay under 4m overall and out of the neighbours’ sightlines.

We sank the floor slab 300mm below the surrounding ground level, which bought us the head height without raising the roofline. A shallow-pitch roof running away from the neighbouring plot keeps the visible mass down. Blackout glazing on one elevation means he can see the garden between rounds without fighting the projector.