From the front porch of her custom-built garden house, Sherry Easter can watch the goldfinches, bluebirds and other birds attracted by the feeders in her perennial wildflower garden.

“It’s a nice reprieve from life in the house,” said Easter, who had the stylish building constructed three years ago, in part because she was tired of having to haul her gardening tools from the house. The quaint structure has tilt-out windows and a comfortable, relaxed character.

“It’s great on a rainy day,” she said. “You can sit out here and it’s very quiet.”

Besides an assortment of garden tools, Easter has assembled a collection of family photos and memorabilia collected through the years at the Iowa State Fair, from the corn brooms hanging up inside to the ironwork sunflower sculpture planted nearby in the garden.

Whether you call them garden houses, backyard rooms or simply garden sheds, extending one’s living space through the use of freestanding buildings, a more common project on the Coasts, is becoming more popular in Iowa.

“People are definitely trying to make their back yard their own, and the sheds are playing a role in some of these back yards,” said Ron Crampton, owner of Gold Dome Buildings in Des Moines. Easter’s building is one of four custom garden houses he has built in Napa Valley, each with its own design and character, he said.

“We started out filling a need for low-cost storage, with quality in mind, but as we’ve grown, our clientele has pushed us up into uncharted waters like the Easters’ job,” Crampton said. “It’s a small job still, but the materials pushed it into numbers we don’t work with every day. We normally work with numbers like a couple thousand [dollars] and theirs was way more than that. But they got a lot for their money. I think we were on the site for three weeks.”

Easter said she left many of the design details to the builder’s discretion, specifying only that she wanted the tilt-out windows and the porch. Her husband, Dick, “always jokes that he spent as much on this as his first house,” she said. “It cost plenty.”

The most expensive backyard project Crampton has done so far, a multi-use structure for a family in Granger, cost about $16,000. The ground floor of the 16-by-24-foot barn-style structure is divided into a workshop for the husband and an office for his homeschooling wife, with the upper level serving as a classroom for their children.

A remodeler who has completed some backyard projects in Greater Des Moines said he believes the trend toward executive-style backyard retreats will continue to grow in Central Iowa.

“It’s amazing what’s being done in the more metropolitan or coastal areas,” said Chadden Halfhill, owner of Silent Rivers Design Build, who attends home design shows across the country. “They’re gorgeous,” he said. “They really pull you into the yard; the yard becomes an extension of the architecture. You see the house, the yard and the outdoor structures all being thought of together. It’s very exciting.”



For those with a desire to build it themselves but who never could get the “measure twice, cut once” regimen down, a number of online companies allow them to choose from dozens of designs, or to create their own design for a building kit that is then shipped to their door.

Summerwood.com, a Toronto-based company whose primary market is California, sold a handful of its kits last year to Iowans, said Haroula Battista, the company’s marketing director. The delivered cost, which includes freight, averages from $6,000 to $8,000 for a 10-by-14-foot building, depending on the style and features.

“What we’re seeing is an increased interest in home studios and home offices,” she said. “The reason is it’s so much more appealing to be working from home than commuting every day.” To encourage more telecommuting, California residents can now get a tax credit for purchasing one of these types of kits.

In Urbandale, Dr. Nathan Hull and his wife, Paula, recently purchased a 16-by-20-foot building from Summerwood that will serve as a social focal point between a new pool and a tennis court they’re having installed in their back yard.

“Our original intention was to use a home builder in the area and have a pool house built, but it was much more expensive than we anticipated,” Paula Hull said. “So we decided to go with something online.”

The pool house will have separate doors for a rec-room area and an equipment area, with a serving window that opens out onto the pool. The opposite end will have a door leading out onto the tennis court.

“We liked the idea of going with Summerwood because you can customize it,” said Hull, who said the kit cost about $20,000. Some of the special features the couple ordered include large boxes on each end for plantings, and a rooster-shaped weather vane for the roof. They decided to hire a contractor assemble the kit, a job that’s estimated to take about 100 man-hours. They hope to have the entire project completed by the end of August.

For those who plan to assemble it themselves, the Summerwood kits come with either pre-cut materials, a less expensive option, or pre-assembled in sections, which eliminates many of the construction steps. In addition to detailed plans, an assembly video and all of the needed fasteners and parts, each kit comes with a disposable camera so that the proud owner can send a photograph of the finished product to the company.

“It’s very satisfying when people send us pictures with great stories about their assembly experience,” Battista said.