26 Jan 2023
The conservatory or garden room is one of the most flexible spaces at home – perfectly suited to dining and sitting, working and playing.
With clever home shading, practical curtains and blinds and underfloor heating – or even a wood burning stove – you can enjoy its charms all year round.
Whatever your style, whether yours is attached to your home or nestled in the garden, here are eight ways to use your space, summer or winter.
Garden rooms and conservatories make great dining rooms, freeing up space in the rest of the house for a second sitting room or snug.
By day, whatever the great British weather is throwing at us, they’re a calming space for a leisurely breakfast or a long, lazy lunch with friends. By night, dress with string lights and flickering candles and stargaze to your heart’s content.
We love this Tresco round dining table with matching upholstered dining chairs.
Arundel dining tables and dining benches, pushed together and dressed up with elegant crockery, sparkling glassware and layers of linen, make for a dramatic dinner setting with twinkling tea lights and festoon lighting.
Choose furniture made from natural materials, to enhance that half-way-house feeling between your inside and outside spaces.
Painted furniture often looks less formal, so ideal for a conservatory or garden room setting. This Sheldrake extending dining table and Wardley dining chairs can be painted in 28 custom paint finishes, to perfectly suit your style and scheme.
We love these Resto stone-topped tables – chic Italian styling in four different marbles and granites with a choice of base colour. They pair perfectly with our Boscombe chairs, with tie-on seat pads for comfort.
For more formal settings, the Aubrey dining table with Lloyd Loom dining chairs is elegant and stylish – at the time of writing, this ex-display set is in our Clearance Sale.
A sanctuary away from the hubbub of the house, creating a second sitting room in a conservatory or garden room is the natural choice.
With bright light and high humidity, choose fabrics and finishes carefully – our interior design experts will talk you through the latest generation of fade-resistant fabrics. Neutral loose covers work well, enhancing the feeling of light and space – and can be easily reupholstered if family life has taken hold.
Neptune's Long Island collection of sofas are perfectly suited to relaxed living.
Cane, rattan and Lloyd Loom will look good for years, and if you choose neutral upholstery, you can dress your pieces up or down with throws, scatter cushions, lamps and rugs.
The timeless curves of the Camellia work in traditional and modern settings, while the classic cane good looks of the Hardy hark back to a bygone age, particularly upholstered in this Sandringham Eau de Nil botanical fabric.
Or try the Knightshayes – solid enough for every day use, it’s a curvy, comfortable sofa with lots of matching pieces and a huge choice of fabrics.
We love this pretty Trafalgar sofa, too, upholstered in Fern Glade Linen. It comes in a stunning choice of surprisingly inexpensive fabrics, from stunning botanicals to plain linens and stripes – and even this Rainforest Lagoon jungle theme.
For smaller spaces, a bistro set is the perfect solution.
Marble or granite-topped bistro sets, paired with ornate metal chairs, looks perfectly at home in this jungle-themed space. Our Boscombe bistro set is similar to this one.
Neat enough not to dominate the room, this Heligan Lloyd Loom table with matching sofa and armchairs is a great spot for morning coffee or that G&T on summer evenings. Or even an informal supper for two when the weather isn’t quite warm enough for sitting outside.
The Heronswood glass-topped table and matching chairs woven in Almond Rattan goes with almost any scheme thanks to a huge choice of fabrics, and is a compact dining option with three table sizes and curves in all the right places.
With more extreme temperatures than the rest of the house, garden rooms and conservatories are often under-used – but with appropriate heating and good home shading, they can be in daily use.
Turn yours into a light, bright, home office – just watch the angle of sunlight when you’re deciding where to put your desk and computer screen.
The clean lines and natural wood of the Chicago desk, with its display slots for phones and tablets, is an inexpensive and practical home office work space.
The year-round, natural light in a garden room or conservatory – or even a summer house – makes it ideal for an artist’s studio or craft room.
Build in storage and a table like the glass-topped Hebden – which doubles as a stylish home office desk – to maximise work space and keep the clutter at bay.
If space allows, introduce a linen-covered sofa like the Packwood, or a cane or rattan sofa, for relaxing in well-earned breaks.
In a garden room away from the house, focus on insulation and pretty, made-to-measure curtains and blinds and turn it into a secluded guest bedroom or teenage bolthole.
Our Swedish-inspired Larsson collection of bedroom furniture is fine and elegant enough for a space like this, or plump for a sofa bed like the linen-covered Olivia to make the most of the space.
Add pretty cushions, throws, string lights, rugs made from recycled materials and piles magazines and books on wooden tables like the Seren for a relaxed, country look.
With bags of natural light, a garden room or conservatory – tucked away from the rest of the house, so a bit of playtime mess won't hurt – makes a great playroom. Bold fabrics and retro styling go hand-in-hand with these spaces. Maximise space for play with smaller pieces and choose fabrics forgiving of little fingers.
Try the cost-effective Oscar sofa or its larger cousin, the Oscar chaise sofa, in vibrant fabrics from Sunny Kingfisher to Sunny Flame, both pictured below.
We love the Sixties vibe of the Tilly sofa and matching armchair, and the Barcelona sofa, armchair and footstool– available in spill-resistant Aquaclean fabrics.
Choosing furniture that works both inside and out is a flexible option for garden rooms and conservatories, blurring the lines between inside and out.
The Cheltenham collection of granite-topped tables and dining armchairs with deep, comfortable cushions, is as at home in the garden as it is inside so you can dine in style, whatever the weather.
Soften the metal with scatter cushions and throws inside and out.
