We design, build and certify A-rated homes of 32–45 m² for Irish back gardens — fully compliant with the Building Regulations, independently certified, and legal to live in from the day we hand over the keys.
If someone is going to sleep in it, Irish law treats it as a dwelling — with the full Building Regulations that protect every home in the country. Most garden rooms on the market are built to garden-office standard. Ours are built, tested and certified as homes. Here’s the honest comparison.
| Typical garden room | A Garden Home | |
|---|---|---|
| Legal status | ✕ Garden office / incidental use only — living in it is not lawful | ✓ A habitable dwelling, designed to be legally lived in from day one |
| Building Regulations | ✕ Compliance rarely demonstrated — no independent sign-off | ✓ Full compliance with Parts A–M, certified under BCAR (the Building Control (Amendment) Regulations) |
| Warmth & running costs | ✕ Typical “100 mm insulated wall” fails the legal standard for a dwelling — cold in January, expensive to heat | ✓ A2 BER target: heat-pump heating, underfloor warmth, solar PV (photovoltaic) panels, high-performance glazing |
| Certification at handover | ✕ A receipt and a wave goodbye | ✓ Statutory Certificate of Compliance on Completion registered before you move in, plus your BER certificate |
| Value & lending | ✕ Uncertified structures raise questions at valuation, insurance and sale | ✓ A documented, certified dwelling — the paperwork your solicitor, insurer and bank will ask for |
“One is a garden room. The other is a home. They are not the same thing — and the name on the brochure is the least of the differences.”
A new planning exemption — S.I. 340 of 2026, in operation from 27 July 2026 — lets you build a detached home of 32–45 m² in your own back garden. No planning application: just a Commencement Notice to your local authority before you start. Full Building Regulations still apply. Here are the conditions that come with it.
Up to 45 m² — a genuine one-bedroom home with living space, kitchen and bathroom. Not a cabin, not a pod.
At least 25 m² of private open space must remain for the main house, so the garden stays a garden.
Up to 4 m to a pitched roof, or 3 m to a flat roof, and at least 0.6 m from every boundary — a real home that respects the neighbours.
You must own the main house and live in it as your main residence — the exemption is not for landlords or second properties.
A separate, independent entrance, with water and drainage connected through the main house’s services.
Because someone lives there, the complete dwelling standards apply — structure, fire, energy, ventilation, access. This is exactly what we do.
A double bedroom with a wall of fitted wardrobes, a full shower room, and a bright open living and kitchen space with a breakfast bar, behind full-height glazing — engineered once, to a standard most garden buildings never attempt, then built the same way every time.
We’re so confident in it that the first Carton Wood will be built in our own back garden — carrying the full statutory certification, with nothing waived. When it’s ready, you’ll be able to walk through it, measure it, and see the paperwork.
A parent who shouldn’t be on their own any more. An adult son or daughter saving for a deposit with nowhere to rent. A certified home in the garden keeps them independent — and thirty seconds away.
Let it long-term to a lodger and the rent may qualify for Rent-a-Room relief — up to €14,000 a year tax free, subject to your own tax advice. Short-term, Airbnb-style letting is not permitted. A certified, A-rated home rents faster and at better rates, with none of the legal doubt.
A certified auxiliary dwelling, with its paperwork in order, is an asset a valuer can stand over — not an outbuilding a surveyor has to explain away when you sell.
Most of the early work happens remotely and costs you nothing. We only put a boot on your lawn once we know your garden qualifies and the numbers make sense.
Send us your Eircode, a few phone photos and a rough tape measurement. We check the exemption conditions, boundaries, access and services — and tell you straight if it won’t work.
You get a desktop layout of the home positioned on a satellite image of your actual garden, with an honest price band — before you commit to anything.
We laser-scan the site in a single visit, and show you the home standing in your own garden in augmented reality, through an iPad, before a sod is turned.
A same-week, fixed-price quote with the specification, programme and compliance commitments in writing. No provisional sums, no surprises.
Factory-precision frame on an engineered foundation. Every critical stage is photographed, inspected and signed off — including an independent airtightness fan test.
Your BER certificate, your statutory completion certificate registered before you move in, and your keys. Legal to live in from day one.
The Garden Home Company was founded by Joe Savage and Stuart Kenny — two construction professionals with years of experience in Irish residential development. After careers spent delivering homes the conventional way, the new planning exemption is a natural next step: the same standards, the same rigour, brought to the back garden.
Joe is a construction project management consultant and the founder of Savvy Projects, with a career spent running residential and commercial builds — the programmes, budgets, contractors and certification that keep a project honest. He brings the delivery discipline: every Garden Home is planned, priced and certified like the serious construction project it is.
Stuart’s background is in residential development and construction delivery, bringing homes from groundworks to handover on Irish sites. He brings the build itself: the details, the trades and the standards that decide whether a home is still performing perfectly twenty years from now.
The honest answer: it depends on your home. No two gardens, layouts or finishes are the same, so every price is prepared individually for your project. What never changes is how we get there: an honest budget range before you commit to anything, and a fixed price in writing after one survey visit. No surprises later.
What you pay depends on the size you choose, the finishes you pick and the conditions of your site. The free garden check gives you an honest budget range first; the survey visit turns it into a fixed price.
Flexible sizes from 32 m² to the full 45 m². Finishes menu from “ready to rent” to “forever home”.
Under the new exemption — S.I. 340 of 2026, in operation from 27 July 2026 — a 32–45 m² dwelling to the rear of your own home does not need a planning application, provided the conditions are met (you own and live in the main house as your main residence, rear garden, at least 25 m² of garden retained, single-storey within the 4 m/3 m height limits, at least 0.6 m from boundaries, its own independent entrance, and services connected through the main house). One step remains: a Commencement Notice to your local authority at least 14 days before work starts — we prepare and submit that for you, and check every condition for your site, free, before anything else happens.
Yes — that is the entire point of what we build. A garden building only becomes a legal home when it complies with the full Building Regulations for dwellings and is certified as such. Every Garden Home is designed to those standards, inspected through the build, and handed over with its statutory Certificate of Compliance on Completion registered before anyone moves in. Ask any other supplier for that certificate. Watch the silence.
It usually means a wall that barely scrapes — or misses — the minimum legal standard for a dwelling. And on a small building, the minimum isn’t enough: a compact home loses heat through proportionally more surface, so it has to be built better than a house to earn the same energy rating. Insulation thickness alone tells you very little — what matters is the certified performance of the whole wall, floor and roof, proven in an energy assessment. Our standard wall is engineered to around U-value 0.14, comfortably beyond the minimum, and the whole home targets an A2 BER — the same rating as a good new estate house.
Banks, insurers and solicitors run on paperwork. A certified dwelling comes with the documents they ask for: statutory completion certification, a BER certificate, engineer’s design certification. An uncertified garden building has none of these, which is where valuations and sales get sticky. We can’t make lending decisions for a bank — but we can make sure your file is the easy kind.
Roughly 6–10 weeks on site, plus statutory notice periods before starting (building control requires 14–28 days’ notice). The early remote stages — qualification, feasibility, quotation — typically take two to three weeks. We give you the full programme in writing with your fixed price.
The quick tests: you own and live in the house; the home goes to the rear; your garden can fit the unit while keeping at least 25 m² of open space; and there’s a workable route for construction access and service connections. Send us your Eircode and a few photos and we’ll tell you within days — for nothing.
It targets an A2 BER — better than most houses built in Ireland today. High-performance glazing, heat-pump underfloor heating, solar panels and independently tested airtightness mean it holds its heat and runs for very little. This is the difference between a home and a garden room with a plug-in radiator.
Government has committed to reviewing the exemption after 18 months. Our answer is simple: we build to the full, permanent standard for dwellings — not to the minimum a temporary loophole might allow. A properly certified home is the safest position under any future version of the rules.
The new regulations are expected within weeks — and the first year will be a land-rush. Send us your details and we’ll tell you whether your garden qualifies, and what your home would cost, before your neighbours have found the form.
We’ll check your garden against the exemption conditions and come back within 2 working days with a straight answer and a budget band.
The Garden Home Company
