A Garden Room in Coburg: Why One Room Beat Four Options

A single north-facing room off the back of an interwar weatherboard, opening to the garden. It does four jobs, and the design work went into the doorway.

I've already written about one option from this project — the library, the wildcard that was never meant to be built. This is what actually got designed, and the more useful story is how we got there.

The brief was a room count

Two adults working from home, both on video calls from nine till five. Two young girls. An elderly dog. Family who live interstate and stay overnight, with nowhere good to put them. One of the parents was working from a child's bedroom or the kitchen table.

Written down, the brief was arithmetic: three bedrooms, two bathrooms and one living area needed to become four bedrooms, two or three bathrooms and two living areas. There was a firm budget cap and a firm reason for the whole exercise — they love the street, they don't want to move, and they want the house to hold them for another decade without feeling forced out of it.

Underneath the arithmetic was something the numbers didn't capture. As they put it, they wanted the house to feel easy, flexible and grown-up. Not cramped, not improvised, and not entirely surrendered to small children.

Four options, four different kinds of answer

Rather than three sizes of the same idea, I presented four genuinely different ones. The intention wasn't to decide on the day — it was to notice what resonated.

Clever Within did nothing to the envelope at all. Divide the large front room into two with joinery, split the existing double door into two single doors, add a wall bed and a built-in desk that drops down to become a bedside platform. It added a bedroom on paper, cost the least by a wide margin, and was almost entirely reversible. It also gave the adults nowhere to retreat to and did nothing for the garden.

The Library was the wildcard: a narrow work-from-home pod to the side of the house with its own street entry, clad in recycled terracotta tiles to match the roof.

The Garden Snug put a second, cosier living space at the rear under a new skillion roof angled to catch northern light, with a covered alfresco, a window seat and a daybed that could take a guest.

The Bedroom Wing was the one that most literally satisfied the written brief — a full main bedroom suite with ensuite at the rear, turning the existing main bedroom into an office and guest room. It was also the only option that broke the budget on its own.

The option that satisfied the brief was the one I argued against

Here's the part worth sitting with. My own note against the Bedroom Wing — the four-bedroom answer, the one that ticked the boxes — was that it doesn't improve how the house feels day-to-day, and that its footprint would overshadow the garden.

That's an uncomfortable thing to write about your own work. It's also the moment the project turned, because it forced a different question: not how many rooms does this house need, but what would actually make it better to live in.

The answer came from the client, not from me. Weighing two revised options a fortnight later, she said the snug was the obvious choice — not because it was cheapest or cleverest, but because it meant finally using the backyard, which they felt was the right thing to do. Better connection to the garden had ranked fifth in the written brief. In practice it decided the project.

Then the good idea started eating itself

The snug kept improving. We enclosed the alfresco so it could be used year-round, and the better it got, the more it turned into a second lounge room sitting next to the first one. Two rooms competing for the same job. Blurred identity. More space, less clarity.

So I stopped adding and asked the opposite question. What if, instead of several spaces that each half-work, there were one really good room that could do all of it well?

The Garden Room

Twenty-one square metres. North-facing. Opening straight to the garden. Deliberately unlike the rest of the house — a skillion roof, more height, more light, a warmer timber palette. It reads as a retreat rather than an extension.

It's an adult lounge. It's a work-from-home room. It's a guest room. It's the indoor-outdoor space the house never had. And it does those four things without any of them feeling like a compromise, because of one detail.

The transition. The obvious move with an addition is to open it up — knock the wall out, let the spaces flow. I did the opposite. There's a deep reveal at the threshold, a slight compression as you pass through, a change in the floor, and a shift in the ceiling. You feel yourself moving into a different mode of living.

That's what solves the two-lounge-rooms problem. The value in this project isn't the twenty-one square metres. It's the ten centimetres of doorway.

The rest follows from it. A raked ceiling and a high clerestory turn the room into a light trap, pulling northern light into the new space and back into the old house behind it. A sliding timber screen conceals either the desk or the television, depending on the hour. A daybed becomes a genuine guest bed rather than a couch someone apologises for. A wall of joinery holds books, a record player, a hundred and fifty records and a small bar, with a tiled splashback in red gloss for a pop of colour behind it.

Nothing has to be packed away. It just adapts.

What it costs to be honest about

The chosen design does not deliver four bedrooms. On plan it's three and a half — more generously four, since none of the rooms are pokey — but it will list as a three-bedroom house, and that is a real trade the clients made with their eyes open.

There's also a risk in flexible rooms, which is that they become nothing spaces: rooms that do everything adequately and nothing well. The only defence is detailing. The threshold, the joinery, the light, the ceiling — that's where the money went, rather than into square metres.

And when we walked the site with a builder during concept design rather than after documentation, he immediately found things that weren't the renovation at all: rotting weatherboards on the south elevation, a front corner sinking on its stumps, a retaining wall leaning under next door's tree roots. None of that is the addition. All of it is the house. We've documented it separately so it stays a maintenance decision rather than quietly eating the project.

The lesson

The brief asked for more rooms. The house didn't need more rooms — it needed one room that was properly different from the rest, and a doorway that told you so.

The two options that best satisfied the written brief were the two I ended up arguing against. That isn't a failure of briefing. It's what briefing is for: the written list is where you start, not the thing you're obliged to build.

The Garden Room is currently in design development, with construction targeted for later in 2026.