Located in Brockenhurst within the New Forest, this garden building was both designed and built by Neutral Projects. The project gave us an opportunity to pilot a range of alternative, digitally-enabled and low carbon building techniques and provided the client with a gym, a sauna and relaxation facilities in a disused corner of their garden. See our instagram page to see images of the building under construction.

The building is clad with a rainscreen of freshly sawn vertical board-on-board Douglas Fir timber sourced from a local sawmill in the New Forest. The trellis - that re-supports an existing and mature grape vine - is an extension of the cladding; together they act as a single facade element framing the view of the garden from the relaxation room within and providing a degree of solar shading. We chose rough sawn timber to contrast with the highly controlled nature of the vertical cladding.

The building confirmed the high thermal performance of the construction techniques piloted; the enclosure has excellent levels of airtightness due to the highly accurate and tight-fitting cnc-cut kit-of-parts developed and deployed by Neutral Projects for the building. 

Photography by Peter Ghobrial.