The return of the orangery garden building under built under permitted development.

Orangeries as a design concept and building style have made a bit of a comeback over the last few years. Even as an attached conservatory to the main dwelling house, their design has grown as a preference to that of the more commonal garden ‘bolt on’ fake Victorian plastic monster that seems to litter most housing estates.

I have never been an advocate of conservatories as I think they add little practical use of space that doesn’t seen to be too cold in the winter or too hot in the summer unless you fill it full of expensive heating appliances and blinds for the summer months - seems to defeat the purpose of having a conservatory in my opinion.

Anyway, the big comeback for the orangery style of detached garden room building has been in the form of a flat roofed design of building with a large central hole cut in for the installation of the feature lantern roof light that accounts for up to two thirds of the roof area.

This design of roof can have some technical issues and PD vagaries when slotting it into the permitted development dimensional criteria for compliance as any other roof than a dual pitched roof must not exceed 3M high. So, is the orangey glazed roof principally a pitched or ridged roof for a 4M maximum height limit or is it a feature roof light within a principally flat roof? Whether this aspect has been tested at the appeal yet remains to be seen.

If the Council Planners and their Legal team determine orangery design of roof to be a flat roof design not to exceed 3M overall in height and the fact that the eaves must be no more than 2.5M high, this only allows for a 500mm height for the feature glazed orangery section which is likely to end up with a very compromised design not looking at all right.

Therefore you may want to consider installing an orangery glazed lantern roof within a traditional pitched roof detached garden room building if only to take advantage of the extra 1M height allowance up to 4M. Something to think about.

For a diagram of the restrictions affecting detached garden rooms click here.