Flintshire garden rooms business takes off with new £500,000 showroom centre

An expanding family-run firm is investing £500,000 to create a new showroom centre for its blossoming garden rooms business.

Rubicon Garden Rooms has already started the transformation of the site, a former farmyard in Flintshire, to meet the demand from customers eager to use their garden spaces.

Bosses said the demand for  its garden rooms, especially home offices, gyms, entertainment spaces, art studios and granny annexes, mushroomed during the Covid pandemic and has been growing ever since.

The company specialises in making zero maintenance garden rooms using aircraft  technology learned by founder and managing director John Lyon when he previously worked as an engineer at Airbus.

The main showroom and new head office are already open and, once completed, the complex on the outskirts of Penyffordd, will be known as The Village, where Rubicon’s wide variety of garden rooms will be on display.

The firm employs 15 installers and three office staff to ensure customers’ needs are met and the surge in orders means there are more jobs on the way.

Supporting John in the growth of the company is son Rob, the firm’s sales and marketing manager.

[ John Lyon and son, Rob]

Customers come from a wide area, including Shropshire, Merseyside, the Wirral, Manchester, Cheshire and North Wales.

The Village will offer them a chance to see, feel and take a tour of the company’s eye-catching garden buildings.

According to John, the garden buildings have endless uses – with customers only limited by their imagination.

He said the transformation of the site on Old Hope Road was continuing at pace.

John, an aircraft engineer for 21 years, said: “Before we bought it, the site was an old farmyard, with some old, dilapidated buildings.

“We’ve demolished some of them and rebuilt a new office space, and built a storeroom and workshop, and have completely refurbished a building used to store hay bales to create a showroom area.

“And over the next 12 months customers will see all the outdoor display areas completed with another seven garden rooms plus a large two-bedroom granny annexe.

The development of The Village means the company is no longer using its former site at Shotton’s Deeside Enterprise Centre and has moved all its operations to the Penyffordd base, located in a beautiful rural setting on the A5104 only a mile from Junction 36 of the A55.

John started the company as a building firm in 2006 and started manufacturing and installing garden rooms in 2013.

He said: “With my aerospace background, I knew about the composite side of things and I started wondering if I could offer a home office which didn’t need maintenance.

“Back then, people’s perception of what a garden room was, was either a shed, a summer house or a conservatory.

“When Covid came along, all of a sudden so many people started working from home, and they started thinking they needed a home office, and we started to grow the business from there.

John added: “I know it’s an old cliche that staff are your most important asset, but in this type of business, and in a lot of businesses, they certainly are.

“Without good staff, it doesn’t matter how good I am at selling what we do and developing what we do, and designing what we do – when the staff go out there to fit it, it must be right, it must be up to our standard.

“The key to our continuing success is focusing on the detail. As a result, Rubicon has won multiple awards for s quality, innovation and overall customer experience.

“We were first garden rooms business in the UK to be approved by Trading Standards, meaning you can buy with confidence, safe in the knowledge that everything is being taken care of by a team that knows what it is doing.

“Rubicon Garden Rooms are made to measure, giving you the chance to find a perfect fit for your garden, and most of our buildings do not require planning permission.”

John started his aerospace career as an engineer apprentice at aircraft firm Hawker Siddeley which later morphed into British Aerospace and then Airbus.

He became a manager and then head of production for the Hawker business jet, leading a staff of 350 workers.

Son Rob joined the company in 2021 and he deals with customer inquiries and showroom appointments.

He also visits customers to take photos and videos of their garden rooms for the firm’s social media content as part of his role.

Rob said the father and son dynamic with John works well, and he was proud to play a key role in the firm’s growth.

He said: “It’s really nice for me actually to see how good my dad is at what he does and how successful he is and to learn about how he communicates with customers.

 “We do work well as a team, and it’s a really exciting time in everything that is happening with the development of the new premises.”

Rob, who trained and worked as a professional actor and is involved in theatre groups in the region, said he particularly enjoyed the creative element of the work the company does.

He added: “There is a big element of creativity in what we are doing in terms of when people come in and tell us about the sorts of things they are looking to get from the garden room they are looking to purchase.

“It can be particularly exciting when people come in and are looking for a garden room for their hobby or passion.

“That could be musicians for example, or photography studios, or someone looking for a fitness studio.”

As previously, showroom visits will be by prior appointment only, so the firm can ensure sales staff are available to give the personal attention customers value.