Budget Breakdown: An Architect Builds an Experimental Garden Studio for Less Than £5k

In the British countryside, Stirling Prize nominee Michael Dillon builds a tiny office as an exercise in low-carbon, low-cost construction.

Oct 10, 2022 - 16:17

Budget Breakdown: An Architect Builds an Experimental Garden Studio for Less Than £5k

In the British countryside, Stirling Prize nominee Michael Dillon builds a tiny office as an exercise in low-carbon, low-cost construction.

Architect Michael Dillon has had an eventful year.

This month, the Sand’s End Arts & Community Centre in London, which Dillon codesigned as an associate at Mae Architects, was announced as a finalist for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ annual Stirling Prize, awarded to the UK’s best building. With its lightweight cross-laminated-timber structure and exterior bricks recycled from construction waste, Sand’s End provided an epiphany.

"It sparked a fire in me," Michael explains, "that there was a way to create architecture that was still really beautiful, but equally sustainable at the same time."

The Garden Studio sits behind the couple's home, a former council house.
Rory Gaylor

For much of this year, however, Michael was busy with a much smaller project. One which he not only designed himself, but also hand-built—and it kicked off the formation of his own firm, AOMD.

£556

Floor

£880

Walls

£632

Roof

£1,197

External Cladding

£706

Doors & Windows

£97

Paint

£120

Built-In Desk

£40

Electrical

£320

Foundation & Landscaping

Grand Total: £4,548

Dubbed the Garden Studio, it sits on a gently sloping hillside at the edge of a protected wilderness in Tunbridge Wells, behind the renovated former council house that Michael shares with his wife, acclaimed artist Eleanor May Watson (who paints in the reclaimed motorcycle garage next door). But this isn’t just an architect’s studio. It’s also a kind of continuing experiment into how buildings can be made without so much waste and carbon.

As seen in an architectural drawing, the house is nestled into a gently sloping hillside.
Michael Dillon

Michael’s studio priced out at £4,548 (approximately $5,045)—a fraction of what traditional approaches would have cost. "A garden studio costs a lot. To buy something like this off the shelf, you're talking like £30,000 to £40,000 perhaps in the UK. And they're really clunky," he says. "I didn’t have that money, but I knew the material costs—and I knew that I could do it for less if I built it myself."

The Garden Studio is designed without any unnecessary concrete, toxins, plastics, or glues—instead, Michael favoried recycled and natural materials. Whenever possible, he removed membranes and linings to enable the building to be fully breathable. It’s also designed to be as low-carbon as possible, and to utilize local materials.