While many garden rooms are made using wood, there’s another option; a brick-built garden room.
Adding a garden room in the back garden gives extra space to indulge in any hobby or relax and stay away from the hustle and bustle inside the house. It can be a home office, a home spa, a memorabilia room, yoga studio, arcade room, or any hobby room.
A great garden room offers the best of the indoors and outdoors at the same time. While most garden rooms use timber as the main construction material, there are many benefits to building garden rooms with bricks.
Looks of a Brick Built Garden Room
Any garden room will look aesthetically pleasing built and situated in a beautiful back garden. However, using the right construction material will add a level of attractiveness to a stand-alone building.
Timber is often a standard, but bricks add a more sophisticated aesthetic value than many other construction materials for a garden room. It has a rustic building material look that blends well with any landscape.
A brick-built garden room is structural and has a visual value thanks to the textures, colour and specific design effect it provides. Garden rooms built with clay bricks can’t help but stand out.
Other advantages of brick garden rooms are the expansive design options available. While red bricks are the classic choice for building, this is not the only alternative available. Brick offers endless design possibilities; they now come in different colours, textures, sizes and shapes to give different surface designs.
Overall, brick is a classic building material that has a lot of charm. It can appear rustic and old or modern and new, but bricks are consistent in drawing more attention than other materials.
Bricks Are Expensive But Add Property Value
Building brick garden rooms tends to be more expensive compared to outbuildings made using other exterior products. However, the material cost is not the primary reason why brick garden rooms can become expensive to build.
A good-quality brick is slightly more expensive than wood or timber but, in some cases, the material price for brick and wood outbuildings will cost almost the same.
Building with bricks, however, takes more time to accomplish compared to timber construction. The ‘dry’ construction process of using timber on a building is less time-intensive than the ‘wet’ construction process of building with brick. More time spent on site means more labour costs, which is the real reason why a brick-built garden room can be costly.
However, the higher price of a brick-built garden room isn’t entirely a downside. As brick outbuildings cost more to build than other construction materials, it pays off by increasing the property value. The extra work and expense associated with building garden rooms with bricks are well worth it in the long run.
Other Advantages of Brick Built Garden Rooms
Besides the aesthetic value of bricks, there are other reasons why they would make excellent material for building a garden room.
Brick is a robust material for construction
Building with brick is a great option for a garden room as it provides strength and durability to the entire structure. Bricks can take many impacts, a proven material that can stand up to the elements, compared to flimsier wood material, and can bear a considerable amount of weight.
Bricks remain ageless, and brick structures can last for centuries.
Bricks are low maintenance
The aesthetic value of bricks is one of the primary reasons many utilise them as a building material. What’s even better is it takes minimal effort to maintain the beauty and quality of brick structures, especially compared to wood. There’s no need to clean exterior brick surfaces often.
Bricks stay durable and aesthetically-pleasing for decades. It will not change colour or fade over time and often only needs an occasional squirt of the hose.
Brick buildings are safer against fire
Another advantage of brick garden rooms is they tend to be safer against fire. Wood burns easily, while brick is fairly fire-resilient. Although bricks are not 100% fireproof and can still crumble when exposed to high temperatures, brick structures are far better at stopping fire spreading than wood.
Bricks don’t rot
Unlike wood, especially the untreated ones, bricks are less susceptible to rotting or decay. They are also resistant to insect infestations, which can be a massive problem with garden rooms made of wood.
Bricks are better at temperature control
The insulating quality of bricks can make the garden room comfortable, whether in the heat of summer or the cold in winter. Bricks are excellent in stabilising interior temperatures, so the inside of the garden room can stay cool during summer or warm during winter.
Bricks keep the noise out
Garden rooms are often built to create an extra and safe place to relax, concentrate, enjoy hobbies or just keep away from the hustle and bustle in the main house. Bricks work well for this purpose because they have better sound insulation than traditional wood used in garden houses. Lightweight timber doesn’t perform as well compared to the excellent level of dense and thick bricks that can help keep the noise out.
Brick Built Garden Rooms Are Built to Last
Building with bricks might be comparatively costly compared when using timber, like in most garden rooms, but it has other cost-effective qualities. For instance, it takes less effort to maintain a brick structure. A brick-built garden room doesn’t require paint or glazing to bring out its beauty.
Since a brick built structure can last for decades or more, less money will be spent on building a new garden room, compared with wood structures that can rot and decay over time.
Bricks and mortar makes a solid structure that can last for decades and even centuries. For garden rooms that look and feel more permanent and robust, bricks are a viable option.
The bottom line is that a brick-built garden room provides aesthetic value with endless design possibilities, an outbuilding that can last for decades and more.
Special thanks Allan Maciver for providing the image