New Garden Centre, Sturmer, Essex

Sturmer Nurseries is a long-established, family-run garden centre. Though popular, the customer-experience was lacking as the operations was run out of a series of large glass houses — cold in winter, hot in summer. We were asked to design a new ‘statement’ building, but to a realistic budget.

Adopting a simple, portal frame structure, with the frame located externally, to achieve maximum sales space, we included a simple, yet effective, overhanging canopy roof at each end of the ‘L’ shaped plan. To achieve an ‘earthy’ nature, the cladding is larch planks, while the structure and window frames are a muted-grey, powder-coated aluminium.

No garden centre is complete, these days, without a cafe and the one here is very popular.