Leaf & Ground Cafe and Garden Centre

The two main buildings at Leaf & Ground, which house the garden centre and the cafe & deli, are packed with traditional oak frame features: dragon ties and beams form the hip ends throughout; elegant queen post trusses create a wonderful vaulted roof; fully braced ‘boss’ trusses form the hip and valley trusses in each corner. All of these combine to create a stunning oak frame, very much in the English vernacular of oak framing.

The cafe & deli building are set in a quadrangle plan, and robustly braced in each corner by the hip ends. This enabled us to remove all lateral bracing in the primary queen post frames, giving a very open and airy feeling to the finished space. The garden centre building has an impressive 4-way valley and boss truss arrangement.

It was a pleasure for Carpenter Oak to work with this client again, as they love oak frame buildings and are confident in building with these traditional frames. Our iterative sketch design process ensured all aspects of the client’s brief were met before the technical design stage, working together to iron out all aspects of the frame design. 

The frame was handcrafted by carpenters at our southern UK yard and transported to site to be raised in 2017. The new venture opened to the public in 2019 and has become incredibly popular with visitors.

We work with clients to build innovative and bespoke spaces across the country. Find out more about the commercial projects we work on or get in touch to discuss your own plans with us.