From the Great Conservatories of the Victorian Age to the present day, the core component of an excellent conservatory design is that it sits in harmony with the rest of the house.
It does not need to be the exact same design as the existing property, but it does need to look like it belongs, which means that there are certain design styles and principles that will be consistently seen in conservatories up and down the country.
If you are buying a period property, such as a late Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian house, then you would be advised if not outright required (depending on its listing status) to build a period-appropriate conservatory in a more traditional style.
Meanwhile, if you have a more conventional detached or semi-detached house on an estate in a suburb, the design will typically continue the style of the brick and window panes, which is why the most common sunroom style in the 1980s and 1990s was primarily PVC and glass.
If you have a standard house, you have a lot of options at relatively lower prices due to the lower costs of producing components in bulk, but what happens if you have the opposite? What if your house is unusually designed for whatever reason?
The answer is that it will take some additional work, consideration and planning with experts to get the perfect conservatory design, but with greater work and greater preparation comes incredible results.
The Barbican Conundrum
One of the best ways to discuss the issue of building conservatories for unusual houses is to explore one of the biggest and most controversial examples, and in that respect, there might be no more controversial building with a conservatory than the Barbican Centre.
In many respects, the Barbican is the complete opposite of the types of properties usually looking for conservatories. Where they are traditional, it is famously iconoclastic. Where they are fairly uniform and fundamentally simple in design, the Barbican is famously complex and multi-levelled.
It is a controversial complex, one that is both adored and reviled in equal measures, although as the Brutalist design aesthetic it epitomises is more respected as an architectural movement, the more it is at least begrudgingly respected.
In the early 1980s, however, there was one part of the building that was less a matter of taste and that was the fly tower near the Barbican Theatre.
This tower, used to manage the rigging of the theatre to enable them to quickly and safely move components over the top of the stage and down to stage level, was always considered to be a stump of a building that took the Brutalist principle of form following function perhaps too far.
There were regular complaints from people who lived in Cromwell Tower, a nearby apartment complex, so the initial plans for a glass pyramid conservatory near the side of the lake were moved to be part of the Barbican theatre.
This led to a lot of rather unusual decisions to get around the rather unique conundrum of building a bright, natural, light conservatory onto a building that was unashamedly stark and concrete, and the decisions made here are those that would shape any unusual conservatory design going forward.
The first decision was the location. The conservatory has the rather unusual trait of being built on the roof of another building, its metal trusses and glass roofing surrounding the fly tower and replacing the concrete view with one of an array of rare plants.
This decision, as unusual as it is now, is very much befitting the core principle of the Barbican as part of an elevated London walkway scheme known as Pedways.
This concept, which would have expanded across the entirety of London, was a concept that the Barbican Estate was designed around. However by the 1970s, the scheme had started to run out of steam, and in the 1980s had been abandoned entirely, leading to a collection of dead-ends, aside from the London Wall in 2017.
The reason for this is that whilst the scheme was relatively easy to implement in the rebuilt part of London where the buildings were already going to be new, it was far more difficult to retrofit existing buildings into the scheme, to say nothing of listed buildings and the potential conservation and heritage nightmare that would entail.
However, the conservatory stands as a monument of that ambitious idealism that led to the creation of the Barbican Estate in the first place.
Another key point is that it takes advantage of the space that is already there. One of the most unique aspects of the Barbican Conservatory specifically is that, much like the Estate itself, it is on multiple levels and layers.
There are the two fish ponds and the terrapin pool on the lower part, and a wide range of different trees and plants incorporated into the existing balcony parts of the fly tower.
The result is a design that evokes the sense that the space has been reclaimed by nature. The concrete, metal and glass are surrounded and provide the home of all kinds of beautiful exotic flora.
In some respects, it becomes the closest a conservatory can come to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a near-mythical set of rooftop gardens that housed a wide range of plants with astonishingly sophisticated irrigation and architecture at the time.
The Barbican Conservatory is the second-biggest conservatory in London behind only the famous Kew Gardens.
The final point is one about visibility, seclusion and shade. The Barbican Conservatory, despite being so huge, is often described as a “secret garden” due to its location and design harmonising with the rest of the building. It is only when someone visits that they know it is there.
The key to this is that whilst it does not have the same harshness as the brutalist structure it is hiding, it is not too different in design, structure and materials from what already exists.
A more conventional conservatory, designed with brick or deliberately evoking the Arts and Crafts movement, for example, would ironically have looked more out of place.
Ultimately, whilst an extreme example and one that might not appeal to everyone, there are a lot of lessons in a concrete jungle for how to design a conservatory around a house that deviates from the norm.