Orangerie kitchen? Yes or no

[Bubblebuttress]

We want an extension than has lots of light. We have a snug room but are thinking of a kitchen orangerie. Are they tacky? Even in brick? They look lovely and light and with underfloor heating might be ok in winter?
AIBU - they are tacky and I would not want one
YANBU - they look lovely, wish we could do it

Gorgeous!

My parents have an orangery attached to their period house. It has brick walls with windows and french doors opening to the garden and a solid roof with glass lantern, faces north east.
It has underfloor heating which makes it expensive to heat in winter, so it's not used then, it can get hot in high summer but is ok with the doors open. It is lovely and light but I certainly wouldn't want to have a kitchen in there.

The noise in the rain can be very very annoying.
I would give that some serious thought.
Bring up a heavy rain sound on your phone and put it on a speaker.
Itvis annoying.

I presume you refer to a conservatory or a flat roof? On a tiled roof with skylights the rain is not intrusive at all.

I know someone with a Penguin stove in it for the winter. It's lovely. There's pictures of it on Instagram

That is always the problem. The way to mitigate that is to have two solid side walls and a small roof lantern or better still too smaller roof lanterns in the solid roof.

It also slightly depends how open the room is to the rest of the house. If it’s effectively an additional box with a door to the main house, those tend to get colder as they’re not warmed by the rest of the house.

Yes, I think more like my second pic the lanterns would be in a solid roof, with two brick walls.

Thank you to the op who said rain noise is less with that.

it seems underfloor heating is the way to go… we have a woodburner that is in the lounge/snug/living room/parlour/cwtch so think of having doors that can open out into the L shaped orangery. I’ll post up some ideas. It’s seems it will cost less than the solid extension even if done to a high standard.

A bit of both, tiled roof with 4 very large velux. I think the noise is tiresome, but I have double doors to the room so I simply close them.
In a kitchen I wouldn't be able to forget about the space.
I have a small velux in my ensuite and the racket from that means the loo door is always closed when it rains.
A noisy racket IMO.
I would hate it in a kitchen.

Friends with bi folds very quickly bought full length blinds for them which did work. Our conservatory has an insulated roof, blinds, underfloor heating, and a wall heater pushing out air. We also have a log burner in the sitting room which does heat it. The reverse being when it's sunny it heats the house which is free heat.

You just need to open/close doors, pull down blinds as necessary.

what square footage are you envisioning?

I thought conservatories had a lockable door between them and the house, when orangeries and sunrooms don’t and are a lot more open.

Well made they don’t need to be sun traps (East facing is good - morning sun) and with a solid roof and decent glazing can be used all year around. Underfloor heating is wonderful and usually efficient (electric underfloor can be expensive so you need a wet system).

One downside is it can make the other rooms a lot darker as they are further away from the windows, be very careful of creating 1 sunny space but also 2 really gloomy ones at the same time.

So really, an extension (not an 'orangerie' or garden room with lots of windows including a roof light? Sounds good to me.

Tbh I love conservatories etc - we had one built on our first house which we used for dining, masses of plants and was nice to sit in. But it was in the right location, worked ok with the shape of the house. I'd love a light airy room like that again but we can't see how it'd work where we are now. If we were moving, a well designed and built one would be a plus. A poorly built or inappropriately sited one would be a no-no.

Must be a personal thing then, I presume.

I quite like hearing the rain on the Velux, which is just as well given that I live in the West Pennine Moors 🙄

What OP is describing is an orangery extension - with more glass and less brick than a regular extension - built by firms that specialise in garden rooms including orangeries and conservatories.

I have no view on orangeries, sun rooms, conservatories or extensions, but can state with confidence (and many years behind me) that 'lounge' hadn't been pretentious since 1973. Sitting room is posher but I think also just classic (I had a sitting room throughout childhood and that was in a Croydon council flat).

I have no idea what distinguishes a living room, having never lived in a house that needed more than one label for the room where you sit. These days, I expect living room might be what you call the ubiquitous knocked through kitchen-diner and the sitting room your front room?

From experience large Velux windows are are effectively a glass area of sloping roof and can be very noisy; roof lanterns rise above the rest of the ceiling and they lift the noise upwards away from the rest of the room. Not saying there’s no noise but it’s not as loud as Velux. But still, another reason for not having one large single roof lantern.

Yes, very good point - I do need to mention that - it has made our kitchen and front room very gloomy having the orangery, or additional room that now apparently has no name 🙄

We have a French door that locks at the back of the house. When the extension was built we were told it was an orangery due to it having solid walls and tiled roof but apparently that must be wrong 🤔 but it's definitely not a conservatory so what do we now call it? Dunno...

But anyway, yes, the downside is a very gloomy kitchen and front room that need lights on all day. They are nicely cool in summer though when the "not orangery" can be like a furnace as it faces west.

So, on reflection, while it is a useful space in and is handy for the dogs, I think in some ways I did prefer the house before, with all the light flooding into the kitchen...

We have a conservatory and it's absolutely deafening in there when it rains heavily, (but has doors we can close from the lounge) we don't use it a lot in the winter.

Westbury are ££££££. Prepare to tip your pockets out.

If you look at their brochures, their work is all big, big houses. Orangeries don't work on anything smaller than a big, period house. Anything else is just a conservatory with a bit of extra brick and an owner who has delusions of grandeur😂

My house has a conservatory and what made a massive difference when we moved in was having a proper roof installed on it so it functions more like a normal room of the house through the seasons. Maybe you could do that? The material looks like slate to match existing roof but is actually a much lighter weight material.

Nice idea but it'll be like a giant greenhouse.

No. I wouldn't add a conservatory onto my house. I knocked the one that was on my house when I bought it. It was too hot in summer, freezing in winter and suffered from condensation to boot! Awful!

I built a proper extension with brick sides and a French doors that fold right back. Didn't want bi-folds as they eat up too much space. I did add a sloping ceiling with velux windows which is a great feature and keeps it all light and bright.

The builder who did it said that he always dissuades people from doing orangeries as the flat roof can cause problems plus the glass is a pain to clean and always looks dirty.

We had one in our old house. A period house in London, designed by our predecessors to blend in beautifully. We had no direct sunlight at all, so it never really heated up to unbearable temperatures, and we found it trapped the cooking heat in the winter to be warm. It had an outside inside vibe that was so soothing in the mornings with a coffee. It became a social hub, we could never move anyone into our dining room. They would gravitate back to the kitchen.

I liked seeing the stars at night - even in London you could see them and the moon. Weirdly I felt more connected to the world, the planet, the changing skies than anywhere else. Cooking quietly. It had a certain peace about it. We never left the place. We used it for reading, cooking, socialising and relaxing. I would have another. My only gripe was not enough kitchen surface space but it was a very small issue compared to the he enjoyment we had.

Ta for that 😁
Okay I'm buggering off to sit in my pretend orangery, low-class peasant scumbag that I am.

Have fun with all your reverse snobbery, guys.

Ah, your extension sounds exactly like our imitation orangery...😂