Practical Advice: what to expect from a Westbury site visit

Having a garden room or orangery built? Here’s what to expect from site visits.

The first step in deciding whether to have a garden room extension or orangery built should be to meet with the companies that you have shortlisted – after all, without getting to know you and your home, there’s no way an extension can be designed to fit seamlessly with the existing building and your lifestyle.

At Westbury, our initial visits are either done by the company founder, Jonathan Hey, or another member of the senior team who has intimate knowledge of our products, such as our Master Builder, Andy. Immediately this benefits customers as they have hands-on knowledge about how the product is built, a wealth of experience from past projects and an appreciation for good design. They will bring images of past builds, measuring equipment and a camera with them to make sure that they collate all the information that the designers might need in order to put together accurate drawings.

During this initial visit, the position, size and style of your new extension will be discussed, and suggestions for changes or improvements will be made, garnered from years of experience in the industry and completing hundreds of projects. We will also discuss planning permission; if it’s needed and how we will manage the application process.

As well as talking about the practicalities, you will be asked about how you and your family use your home, what your aspirations are for your new space and to gain a feel for your likes and dislikes in terms of architecture style and design.

After the initial visit, our designers will put together drawings based on the discussions for you to review, and with close liaison between you and our designers the tweaks which ensure your extension is perfect are done. Once finalised, our designers create a beautiful watercolour version for you, so that you can see exactly how your new extension will look when it’s complete. We’ve often seen them hanging in our customer’s orangery or garden room after everything is finished!

Additional site visits will be made prior to the build in order to discuss the access route and how best to get the deconstructed extension on site. The main purpose for additional site visits prior to the build is to make sure that all obstacles have been assessed and a plan and schedule has been agreed.

We always ensure we meet our customers face to face and get to know them and their home. Not only does this ensure that we design a garden room extension which truly realises your dreams, but it helps to greatly reduce any issues there might be further along in the process. In fact, many of our customers say that the building work did not disrupt them in any way, and that it was even enjoyable for many! Just check out our case studies for more details.