A detached brick garden building designed as a bar and games room — hand-cut brick arches, a herringbone gable panel, a hand-laid chimney and a vaulted timber ceiling inside, finished with a log burner, camper-van bar, CCTV and a block paved terrace.
The brief was simple to say and hard to build: a proper standalone brick building in the garden that could be a bar, a games room and a place for the family to spend evenings — not a timber shed with a bar sign on it.
Everything here is masonry-led. The walls are cavity brickwork in a soft red facing brick, the openings are turned in hand-cut brick arches, the gable carries a herringbone panel, and the chimney was laid by hand off scaffold. Inside, a vaulted boarded ceiling and a brick fireplace niche do the work that plasterboard would have flattened.
We took it from footings to finish: brickwork, roof, chimney, joinery, block paving, wiring, CCTV and the intercom monitor.
Off the slab, the walls went up in cavity brickwork to string lines run off the corners, with the fireplace opening and the bar recess built in from the start rather than cut in later.
The door and window heads are proper brick arches turned over plywood formers — each ring set out so the voussoirs land evenly and the joint tapers cleanly rather than being fudged at the crown.
The gable is where this building earns its keep. A herringbone brick panel is set into the elevation, framed by a raking soldier course that follows the pitch — every brick cut on site and dry-laid before it was bedded.
The chimney was laid by hand off the scaffold, corbelled out at the top and capped with a clay pot. It vents the wood burner inside and gives the building the outline of something that has always been in the garden.
The entrance is a bespoke arched door with a round light, hung inside the brick arch with curved side lights either side — the sort of opening that has to be built accurately in brick first, because the joiner can only follow what the arch gives him.
Outside, we laid a block paved terrace across the front elevation, wide enough for a table, benches and the barrel the owners use as a drinks stand, with festoon lighting run off the eaves brackets.
Internally the brick was left exposed and the roof boarded out as a vaulted timber ceiling, which keeps the volume of the building instead of hiding it behind a flat plasterboard lid.
The fireplace niche we built at shell stage now houses a wood burner on a brick hearth under a solid oak bressummer. The floor is laid in a paved brick-effect block, and the room takes a full-size pool table, corner seating, a dining table and the owners' camper-van bar with room to spare.
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Early lifts — fireplace opening and arch formers built in from the start.
"Man cave. JRC Developers Limited. Est 1990."
