New but very familiar
Ultraframe’s marketing director Alex Hewitt discusses the new range of contemporary Garden Rooms.
Since the first lockdown, we’ve all spent more time than ever before in our homes, and this has led to many homeowners desiring more space.
Often in an area separate to the home to allow for privacy for working or working out, this has led to the explosion in the demand for garden rooms.
New and available from this month [April 2021], we’re thrilled to launch our own range of Garden Rooms and are sure that they are going to be greatly received by our customers and the wider industry.
As with all Ultraframe systems, we have taken great care to design a product that looks stunning, brings in huge amounts of natural light, is long lasting and highly energy efficient. They are also available on a 10-day lead time, which is very fast in a sector where timings can be much longer.
The warmth of our Garden Rooms is a feature that we are sure will be a key selling point. Both styles – The Studio with a reverse lean-to roof and The Pavilion with a Georgian roof – use energy efficient components that exceed Building Regulation requirements. Standard garden rooms are not required to reach this high thermal performance level, and so tend to use lower spec components. This means that they are more expensive to heat and might even struggle to achieve a comfortable temperature in the colder months.
We can confidently state that Ultraframe Garden Rooms will be warm, comfortable spaces that can be used all year round and will be energy efficient in terms of heating bills. In fact, they are twice as energy efficient as other premium Garden Room brands on the market.
Key to the outstanding warmth of our Garden Rooms are the Livinroof, which offers a U-value as low as 0.16W/m2K, the Super-Insulated Columns that feature in both styles, and are five times more thermally efficient than brick piers of the same size, and our new patented Ultrapanel wall technology which has a U-value of 0.17W/m2K.
All of the components in our new Garden Rooms are already familiar to our customers, meaning that no additional training is needed, so they are already equipped with the skills they need to start building them. This includes the Livinroof, which features on both styles.
We launched Livinroof back in 2013 and since then it has grown hugely in popularity as a contemporary solid roof, making it the perfect choice for our new Garden Rooms. In addition to its modern good looks, Livinroof’s stand-out feature is its thermal performance. A true warm roof system with no cold bridging, Livinroof offers a U-value as low as 0.16W/m2K thanks to its thermally broken rafters. This means that it exceeds the Building Regulations requirement of 0.18W/m2K for home extensions and is far superior to standard garden rooms that typically offer a U-value of 0.3W/m2K-0.7W/m2K. This makes it the ideal choice for our Garden Rooms as it means they can be used throughout the year, regardless of the outside temperature.
Also boosting the thermal performance of our new Garden Rooms are the Super-Insulated Columns which feature on the corners of both Garden Room designs and are already used by our customers on orangeries and conservatory extensions. These have a U-value of just 0.15W/m2K, and not only enhance the warmth of our Garden Rooms, but also contribute to the speed at which they can be built, as they can be installed in minutes.
Finally, the side walls of our Garden Rooms feature our patented Ultrapanel technology which is already familiar to installers who use Ultraroof. These unique Ultrapanels are a true technical innovation and offer unrivalled thermal performance. Ultrapanels combine the latest steel and timber construction methods with high performance, styropor carbon-enriched expanded polystyrene (eps) bead insulation. A U-value of 0.17W/m2K is achieved, which far exceeds the Building Regulation requirement of 0.27W/m2K, and the 0.3W/m2K-0.4W/m2K achieved by standard garden rooms. This exciting technology is 100% unique to Ultraframe.
Of course, our Garden Rooms are not just extremely warm, they look beautiful, are bright, fade free, and extremely durable. In fact, we can confidently state that they have a life span beyond 30 years, which is a great selling point to any homeowner.