A garden studio at the end of a Poole lawn

Two people working from one spare bedroom, a long thin garden, and a fixed budget. The answer was 17 square metres at the bottom of the plot.

Sarah and Dan had been sharing a box room since 2020: two desks, two sets of calls, one door. They wanted separate working space without moving house, and they wanted it to look like it belonged in the garden rather than parked on it.

The garden is 34m long but only 6m wide, with a shared side access barely a metre across. Everything had to come through by hand, and the neighbouring boundary sat inside the 2m line, so the roof height was capped at 2.5m from the outset.

We set the room across the full width at the far end, with a shallow mono-pitch roof running back so the tall side faces the house. Ground screws instead of a concrete base meant no mixer, no barrows and no damage to the lawn. Full-height sliding doors on the long elevation keep the interior bright without the room feeling like a shop window.