A Hardwood Garden Room at a Grade II Listed Castle

Deep in the Yorkshire Dales, a Grade II listed 19th century stone castle had a listed greenhouse attached to it that had reached the end of its life. Our brief was to replace it with a bespoke hardwood conservatory the owners could use as a garden sanctuary, aligned with the formal pond, fountain and historic walled garden.

The design is a dual-pitch, side-gabled structure that sits between Victorian glasshouse geometry and modern engineering. Sapele hardwood was chosen for its strength, which let the glazing bars stay genuinely slim and the glass area stay large. The frame was factory-coated and hand-finished in Farrow & Ball's Cromarty No. 285, a muted green-grey that shifts with the Dales light and keeps the building from overwhelming the garden around it. Rather than modern brickwork, the structure sits on dwarf walls of locally quarried Yorkshire stone, dressed and laid by masons to match the coursing and colour of the ancient garden walls.

Two constraints ran through the whole job. Every design decision needed sign-off from planning and conservation officers, so we worked in traditional mortise-and-tenon joinery, classic proportions and a palette drawn from the existing stone, with hidden structural steel tie bars managing the roof loads out of sight. The Dales microclimate did the rest of the arguing: high wind loads and heavy winter snow, carried on a frame that still had to look delicate.

Argon-filled double glazing with low-emissivity coatings keeps it warm in winter and cool in summer. The gabled sidepieces give it a stately symmetry from the garden, and from inside the thin framework frames the water and the flowerbeds like artwork.