FEATURE: AUTUMN & WINTER PREP
NOW IS THE TIME TO PLAN THE PERFECT GREENHOUSE
Dreaming of a beautiful, handcrafted, period greenhouse to complete your garden? White Cottage Greenhouses, specialist craftsmen of exquisite, historically authentic Victorian and Edwardian greenhouses, reports customers are often too late when starting to plan for a new spring greenhouse, waiting until the last minute, when now is the time to act.
W
hite Cottage Greenhouses, a family-run business based in Sandbach, Cheshire, reports
that April and May are their busiest months for new enquiries, but this is often too late for a bespoke greenhouse to be designed, built, delivered and installed in time for the spring growing season. There are also some key considerations to think about as part of the planning process, to ensure customers get the most from their new greenhouse. Tori Tomlin, Director at White Cottage Greenhouses says: “One of the biggest issues we experience is that customers start thinking about ordering a greenhouse too close to when they want to start enjoying and using it, and this is invariably in spring. A combination of one- click purchasing habits and the excitement of seeing our gardens wake from winter hibernation may be behind this, but a hand-crafted greenhouse is a ‘slow purchase’ – one requiring considered planning and time to design, build and install. A luxury, period greenhouse will be a treasured part of your gardening life for many years and is worth the wait, but to enjoy potting up seedings and starting tomatoes in spring, now is the golden window to start the process.” White Cottage Greenhouses are made to order and handcrafted using a unique blend of painted Accoya timber and powder-coated aluminium – a process that takes time and skill. Choosing the size, style, and finalising the layout take time, and builder’s availability and bad weather can also impact on the timeline. Tomlin adds: “Our greenhouses
are far from being off-the-shelf items, even with our standard buildings, everything is tailored – from the orientation and structure to access points, ventilation, and finish. It’s worth every bit of planning, but you need to start that process months in advance.”
14 DIY WEEK SEPTEMBER 2025
glass to go from a preserve of the affluent to a possibility for everyone. A
key component of any
Planning the perfect greenhouse There are also some essential decisions that go into planning the perfect greenhouse – from design and size to utility access. Tori Tomlin of White Cottage Greenhouses has put together the following tips to help autumn planners get started. For more advice, visit White Cottage’s Journal to read their four-part ‘Art and Craft of Planning the Perfect Greenhouse’ at: https://www.whitecottage.
co.uk/planning-a-greenhouse-1
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Location, location, location – Placement and orientation of the greenhouse is clearly important and there are a number of things to think about, paramount of which is what you intend to grow, and the optimal growing conditions required. A south facing, east/west orientation is the generally accepted objective, but with temperatures on the rise don’t rule out areas of your garden where some natural shade can provide respite from an unrelenting summer sun.
Freestanding, bespoke or lean-to? – You get more greenhouse bang for your
hard-earned buck if you have room for a freestanding structure, and if you have flexibility on the specific dimensions, choosing an ‘off-the-peg’ standard building will save you money. For example,
our range of Signature buildings – models and footprints we’ve learnt over the years will satisfy many gardeners and a wide variety of gardens – share common features such as standardised bay widths and defined ventilation options, enabling us to pass on the benefit of more efficient production to you. As tried and tested options, they don’t require the same design time as a bespoke project either, and our simple self-certification process also negates the need for a site survey, saving further time and money. If you’re really keen to incorporate a high wall but have a limitation on how high that can be, a three- quarter span design could be the solution. Most commonly adjoining the side of the wall via a valley junction, this is a great way to claim more headroom in the greenhouse without needing to compromise on the roof pitch.”
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Victorian designs and the benefit of dwarf walls – The term ‘Victorian Greenhouse’ is widely used to describe a more traditional style of greenhouse. Here at White Cottage, we use the term to specifically describe one of the two specifications that we offer (Edwardian being the alternative), inspired by the distinct design aesthetics of those periods and how glasshouse manufacture and usage evolved allowing growing under
traditional style greenhouse, and integral to the handwriting of ours, is the low base wall. A design feature first established by the Victorians who pounced on the increasingly available technologies of the time to help them extend the growing season and increase yield to better feed their families and wider communities. Plants grown in the ground alongside the dwarf wall have their roots shaded from direct sun and the earth is kept cooler and moister for longer. It provides the ideal location for heating pipes or wall-mounted electric heating tubes. You’ll often see apertures built into the dwarf wall of original period glasshouses through which they would draw in the fresh cold air to warm up as it crosses the heating pipes before it distributes throughout the greenhouse. This can also work the other way if you site cold frames on the outside – warmth from the greenhouse trickles through into the cold frames. And don’t forget present day concerns such as where to site sockets, for example, or worries over the potential for broken glass in proximity to pets and young children, with glass-to- ground designs being so much more vulnerable to accidental damage.”
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Will you entertain in your greenhouse? – If considering a greenhouse as a multi- purpose space, a larger structure obviously gives you more scope to include furniture, but other things to think about include the footprint of your greenhouse – typically a greenhouse is rectangular with a door at the end, but combining squarer proportions with the door positioned in the side (such as our Croft) can work better. If you are able to incorporate a partition in your greenhouse you can create different growing environments, (frost-free or temperate, for example) but you can also have one area devoted to human comfort – allowing yourselves a little heat on a chilly evening perhaps or
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