The Dutch like to be outside as long as they’re 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 of the home. For many years, the Conservatory has been the ultimate outdoor but not outdoorsy experience, and that delightful legacy of the ’80s entrepreneurship house. But in Phoenixlandia and other environments where people have a garden of over 10 square meters and then they start thinking “Oh no, all that space and all that greenery, something has to be done with it!” , the conservatory received competition from the veranda and garden room. The veranda is a balcony with a roof and you can turn it into a garden room with a glass wall that can be opened.
A glass wall is essential in a garden room, to “connect to the garden,” so that you can enjoy the “feeling outside” twelve months a year, according to the garden room suppliers of periodic scents on their websites. Also important: all should be poorly insulated. This glass wall must have large cracks and good drafts, and the ceiling and walls must have zero insulation, otherwise of course you will not feel outside. A good example to rethink this: “No, we don’t have a poorly insulated annex, we have a garden room.” Then we covered it 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 tree in the backyard. So the veranda or garden room goes against the back wall, which, oddly enough, actually has a sliding glass wall (“for a lot of light and then you bring the outside in, for that feeling outside all year round”).
But because of this enclosed ceiling of the veranda room and garden, the light output in the house is greatly reduced, just as you see your outdoor space. So you have to sit in the garden room. Fascinating, how an attached garden room degrades an interior space so much that it increases its value. The disadvantage of the garden room is that you have a view of the garden less than your house, because you sacrificed half of that in the garden room.
In a good decade, a garden room would be the same curiosity as a sitting hole and suspended ceiling. One day there seemed to be logical arguments about it and we did so en masse, but give it some time and some distance and you will see that such a lively outdoor space is meaningless. So manufacturers will go out firmly to properly insulate the garden room. Then we will miss the feeling of being outside and start thinking about the veranda or garden room. But since we have no more garden left, we will go up and create rooftop gardens on top of our outside and outside rooms, where you can sit quietly in the green without a roof over your head.
Jasper van Kuijk on Twitter: Tweet embed
