the penthouse overview

Vivid Green's flagship product is The Penthouse Garden Office - a stimulating, modern garden room designed for work, rest and play and developed using low energy technologies according to our design principles. (see gallery or video).

The five sided Penthouse garden office offers 5.5, 10 or 19 square metres of floor space and the following features and benefits:

  • well insulated to reduce temperature fluctuations and heating costs
  • good acoustic insulation to reduce noise from outside and inside
  • sufficient glass to create an even light inside
  • southerly orientation of some windows to warm the room combined with roof overhang and natural shading to reduce overheating in Summer
  • airtight structure to reduce heat loss.

Heating is provided by an electric underfloor foil which is fully automatic and programmable. The power output of 100W per sq metre guarantees a warm room even on the coldest days and, because the heat is at floor level, the thermostat can be set several degrees lower than is normal, typically 18-20°C. Heating costs are less than £0.30 a day averaged over the year (for 10.5 m²).

Uses to which The Penthouse can be put include:

structure

The prototype Penthouse garden office used a post and beam construction with over 60 mortice and tenon joints! This produced a beautiful, extremely solid structure with lots of exposed beams and pegs inside but is very uneconomic.

Our current design uses Structurally Insulated Panels (SIPS) to facilitate quicker installation without compromising thermal efficiency and make it much easier to achieve an airtight building envelope. These panels are used to construct houses and larger buildings up to four storeys and incorporate a layer of insulation between two sheets of Oriented Strand Board (OSB).