Serving Cambridge Since 2018
An extra room without moving house. In a city where the stamp duty alone on a bigger place would pay for most of the build, that maths is hard to argue with.
We design and build garden rooms across Cambridge and the surrounding villages, finished by our own team, ready to use on handover. Offices, gyms, studios, guest rooms and treatment rooms.
Cambridge does need doing carefully. Conservation areas cover a large part of the city, listed buildings are everywhere, and some streets have lost permitted development rights entirely. Send us your postcode, and we will tell you exactly where you stand before you spend a penny.
What our customers say
Pro Assist Garden Rooms In Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Cambridge houses tend to be older, taller and narrower than they are wide, with gardens that run a long way back. That shape suits a garden room well, because the building sits far enough from the house to feel genuinely separate while still being twenty seconds from the back door.
We handle the whole build ourselves, so nothing is left for you to arrange afterwards. The most common briefs we take here:
Frequently asked questions.
Our most frequently asked questions.
Call 01234 959502 or email info@pro-assist.co.uk. Include your postcode when you get in touch, because that lets our team check the conservation area, listed building and Article 4 position before we arrive. You will deal with the same professional and friendly people from the first visit through to handover, which is the level of service most of our work comes back to us on.
Size, foundation design, glazing, services and finish all move the figure, and an address requiring planning permission carries costs that one under permitted development does not. After a visit, you get an itemised written quote with nothing buried in it.
The shell goes up quickly. What sets the real timescale is the approvals route where one is needed, then groundworks, glazing lead times and the internal finish. We give you an honest view of both halves at quote stage rather than a build time that quietly ignores the paperwork.
A DIY pod or self-build kit gives you a shell and leaves the difficult parts to you, which usually means finding a groundworker, an electrician and a plasterer yourself and coordinating all three. We handle designing and building the room from start to finish, including the foundation, services and finishes. The craftsmanship and attention to detail on the parts you cannot see afterwards is what determines whether the room still performs in ten years.
In Cambridge, usually by a wide margin. Once you have added stamp duty, agent fees, legal costs and the price difference on a larger house, moving for one extra room rarely stacks up. An extension means months of upheaval inside the house and often costs more per square metre than a garden building. This route gets you extra space without either.
It should be, and that is what separates a properly built room from a summerhouse. A fully insulated, high performance build keeps heat where you want it, so a modest heater handles a cold morning. Ventilation is designed in at the same time, because an airtight room without it will end up damp. A 3m by 4m room built this way is comfortable in February and cool enough in July.
Yes. A certified electrician takes the supply from your consumer unit and signs it off under Part P. We plan every socket, light and data point around how the room will actually be used. For an office, running wired data while the walls are open is worth doing and costs very little at that stage.
Yes. It needs a water supply, hot water and a proper connection to your foul drainage, which is construction work rather than an accessory. The distance from the building to your existing drain usually drives the cost, so we trace it during the site visit rather than estimating it from a plan.
Only where it has been designed and approved for it. Any building containing sleeping accommodation needs full building regulations approval regardless of size, and the planning position has to be settled separately. Garden annexes with a bedroom, toilet and shower are entirely buildable, and are often what people mean when they talk about a granny annexe, but they are a construction project rather than a purchase. Say so at the start and we will take you down the correct route.
Not normally below 15 square metres with no sleeping accommodation. Between 15 and 30 square metres it stays exempt provided there is no sleeping accommodation and the building sits at least a metre from a boundary or uses substantially non combustible materials. Over 30 square metres, approval is required. Electrical work is certified whatever the floor area.
Yes. Eddington, Northstowe, Cambourne and the newer village extensions often operate design codes or an estate management company with its own approval process, running entirely separately from planning. It is easy to overlook, so check your deeds and any estate documentation early.
All sorts. The most common by a distance is a workspace, since a garden studio is ideal for offices and gives you a genuine work-life separation that a spare bedroom never quite manages. Beyond that we build gyms, hobby rooms, an art studio here and there, workshops, music rooms and quiet hideaways for reading. Because the room is fully insulated, it works year round rather than emptying out every October.
Yes. Every building we do is bespoke rather than chosen from a catalogue, so cladding, roof profile, colour and glazing are all decided with you. Some people want a stylish contemporary studio with sliding doors onto a deck. Others want something quieter in timber that sits softly at the end of the garden. There is a wide range of options available, and we tailor the design to the house rather than the other way round.
Frequently, yes. The real constraint is the rule limiting buildings to half the land around the original house, which bites much sooner on a compact plot, particularly if a shed or an existing extension already counts towards it. We measure what is genuinely available and size the room from that, then use full-height glazing and a light interior to keep even a modest footprint feeling open and airy.
Yes, and that describes a great many Cambridge properties. The Victorian terraces around Mill Road, Romsey, Petersfield and Newnham rarely have side access, so materials come through the house or over the boundary. It calls for planning and care with your floors and doorways, but our team does it regularly and it seldom rules a project out.
Gault Clay is highly plastic, which is the technical way of saying it swells and shrinks more than most soils as moisture levels change through the year. The foundation has to be designed around that rather than dug to a default depth. Because our garden buildings are relatively light, ground screws or a piled base frequently outperform a concrete slab and take far less out of your outdoor space. We specify after a site visit, never before.
Two separate things. If the tree carries a preservation order, or simply stands within a conservation area, you must give the council written notice before doing any work on it, and in a conservation area that means six weeks. Separately, tree roots and shrinkable clay interact in ways that affect the foundation design. We look at both before committing to a position in the garden.
It is a direction removing specific permitted development rights across a defined area, and Cambridge has several. If one applies to your street, work that would ordinarily proceed without an application may need permission. It is not something most homeowners would know about, so we check it against your address at the outset.
Usually yes, though it needs handling carefully. A new building in the garden of a listed property will almost always require planning permission, and the effect on the setting becomes a material consideration. That influences where the room sits, how tall it is and what it is clad in. We design around those constraints rather than submitting a standard drawing and hoping, and it is a longer route rather than a closed one.
No, but it changes the process and sometimes the design. Permitted development rights can be reduced, so an application may be needed where a house elsewhere would not require one. Materials, roof profile and how visible the building is from the street all carry more weight, which is where a fully bespoke approach helps. Timber cladding and a lower, quieter profile will usually sit more comfortably in a sensitive setting than something aggressively modern.
Cambridge City Council for the city itself, South Cambridgeshire District Council for the surrounding villages. The two run a shared planning service, which makes things more consistent than they once were, though they remain separate authorities. Head towards Ely and you reach East Cambridgeshire, west and you are into Huntingdonshire. We install garden rooms throughout Cambridgeshire, so we are used to working with each of them, and we confirm which covers your postcode before anything else happens.
Often you will not, but Cambridge is one of the places where the exceptions bite hardest. The standard rules allow a garden building without permission provided it is single storey, sits behind the front wall of the house, covers no more than half the land around the original house, and stays within 4m overall for a dual pitched roof, 3m for anything else, or 2.5m if any part comes within 2m of a boundary. Conservation area status, listed buildings, flats and Article 4 directions all change that answer, and Cambridge has more of all four than most cities.
