The conservatory is back. Not the uPVC lean-to your grandparents added to the back of their semi-detached in 1983 — that particular architectural tragedy is, mercifully, fading from the landscape — but the proper conservatory: a glass room, often freestanding, always beautiful, that exists in the liminal space between indoors and out. A room where you can eat breakfast under a fig tree in January. A room where the light is different — greener, softer, filtered through leaves and glass. A room that is neither house nor garden but something between the two, and more magical than either.
The Victorian conservatory, which reached its apogee in the great glasshouses of the nineteenth century — the Palm House at Kew, the Temperate House, the Crystal Palace — was a statement of imperial confidence. It said: we can grow anything, anywhere, in any season. We have conquered nature, and this glass room is the proof. The modern conservatory revival makes a more modest but, I think, more interesting claim. It says: we want to live with plants, not conquer them. We want a room where the boundary between inside and outside is negotiable. We want to eat breakfast under a fig tree, not as an act of domination but as an act of attention.
The new conservatories
The best examples of the new conservatory are not grand. They are small, often self-built, and they are attached to houses not as status symbols but as essential living spaces. In a converted warehouse in Peckham, an architect named Sam Winter has built a conservatory the size of a small bedroom onto the back of his kitchen. It is constructed from reclaimed Victorian cast iron and single-glazed — ‘double glazing would make it too efficient,’ he explains. ‘A conservatory should be slightly uncomfortable. Hot in summer, cold in winter. That is the point. You should feel the weather.’
The room is filled with plants that would not survive in an English garden: a lemon tree in a large terracotta pot, a climbing jasmine that has covered one entire wall, a collection of pelargoniums on a shelf made from scaffolding boards. A small table and two chairs sit in the centre, surrounded by foliage. Winter eats breakfast here every morning, even in February. ‘It is cold,’ he admits, ‘but the light is incredible. And the plants are alive, even when everything outside is dead. That is worth being cold for.’
In a cottage in the Cotswolds, the garden designer Mary Keen has taken a different approach. Her conservatory is a working greenhouse that she has made beautiful — potting bench at one end, a pair of Lloyd Loom chairs at the other, terracotta pots stacked against the walls, strings of sweet peas climbing toward the roof. ‘A conservatory should earn its keep,’ she says. ‘It should not just be a place to sit. It should be a place where things grow, and where you go to be with the things that are growing.’ In winter, the conservatory is full of overwintering pelargoniums and pots of bulbs being forced for the house. In summer, it is full of tomatoes and chillies and the particular, heady smell of warm tomato leaves that is, for many gardeners, the definitive scent of high summer.
How to do it
The conservatory revival is not, or should not be, about money. The most beautiful conservatories I have seen cost surprisingly little. A lean-to against a south-facing wall, built from second-hand bricks and a few sheets of polycarbonate, will grow almost anything and cost a fraction of a bespoke glass structure. What matters is orientation — south or south-west for maximum light — and ventilation, because a conservatory that cannot be opened in summer will cook everything inside it. Roof vents, side vents, a door that can be left open — these are the essential infrastructure. Everything else is optional.
The planting is the joy. A conservatory gives you an extra climate zone — effectively, a Mediterranean garden attached to your house. Lemons, limes, and oranges will grow happily in pots and produce fruit in summer. Bougainvillea, that most flamboyant of climbers, will cover a wall in a single season if given enough light. Pelargoniums — the scented-leaved varieties, not the bedding types — will fill the air with the scent of rose, lemon, or nutmeg whenever you brush against them. And in the dead of winter, when the garden outside is mud and twigs, the conservatory is a green room full of living things — a reminder that the world is still turning, that spring is coming, and that there is always somewhere to sit with a cup of tea and watch things grow.
