Oak frame garden shelter — Crickhowell

Paul and Kate had a narrow, overgrown space down the side of their house doing nothing. They wanted it usable, with a shed and a log store built in, and they did not want the light into the house restricted. They had always liked Roman loggias and asked whether the design could follow that.

A loggia, three point four metres wide and six and a half metres long. It carries a good many more posts than a structure that size needs. That is the point of it — the posts and the bracing are where a loggia gets its character, and Paul and Kate had asked for that feel rather than for the cheapest way to roof the space.

The shed sits inside the main structure, one point two metres deep by three point three wide. The log store is three metres by one point two and connects onto the outside. Both are clad in cedar, so they read as part of the run rather than as boxes added on the end.

The glass panel in the roof was Paul and Kate's idea. They were concerned that the structure would take too much light from the office window below it, and they were right to be. It is the detail the whole scheme turns on.

Turnkey, four weeks on site.

The work started with clearing the site and restoring a half-buried stone wall that was crumbling, before any frame work began. That was in the original price rather than a variation found later. The wall had to carry part of the structure, and it was clear on the first visit that it would not do so as it stood.

The brief was to make use of the side of the house before it was anything more specific than that, with the log store and the shed as the functional part of it.

Going back since, we found it had taken on a use nobody drew: over winter it is where their large rabbits live.