The Return of the Orangery

The orangery began as a status symbol for people who wanted lemons in December. From the seventeenth century, the great houses of northern Europe built these grand, glazed garden rooms to overwinter their citrus trees, precious, tender and impossibly fashionable, and the ability to serve home-grown oranges from your own estate in the depths of winter was a boast of the highest order. The fruit was always half the point; the building was the real luxury. Centuries later, the orangery is enjoying a genuine revival, and this time it is the room itself we covet.

The modern return of the orangery is easy to understand once you have stood in one. Unlike its lighter, fully-glazed cousin, the orangery has solid walls, large windows and a flat or lantern-topped roof rather than a fully glass one. This gives it something a conservatory often lacks: it feels like a proper room, usable in all seasons, rather than a glass box that bakes in summer and freezes in winter. It is the sensible, substantial version of the garden room, and that substance is the secret of its comeback.

Why the orangery works where the conservatory struggles

The genius of the orangery is its balance of glass and solid. The generous windows flood the room with light, but the masonry piers between them, and the mostly solid roof, give the structure thermal mass and shade. The result is a room that stays comfortable across the year, warm in winter, cool in summer, where an all-glass structure swings between extremes. This is why so many people who added a conservatory in decades past are now building orangeries instead.

The solid elements also make the orangery feel connected to the house rather than tacked onto it. With proper walls, a real roof and often a lantern to draw light down into the centre, it reads as an extension of the home’s architecture, in the way the best examples of the garden room always do.

The room between house and garden

What the orangery does best is mediate. It sits between the enclosed rooms of the house and the open ground of the garden, and it belongs fully to neither. Filled with plants, floored in stone or brick that can take a little damp and dirt, and furnished for lingering rather than for best, it becomes the room where the family drifts: breakfast in the morning light, a book in the afternoon, drinks as the garden darkens.

It is the room we always end up in, one owner told me. Something about the light and the plants pulls everyone there.

That gravitational pull is the orangery’s great gift. It offers the pleasure of being among plants and light without the exposure of actually being outdoors, and it extends the usable garden season by months at either end. It is, in effect, the indoor counterpart to a well-planted courtyard: a sheltered outdoor-indoor room that the household cannot resist.

Building one well

The orangery rewards being done properly and punishes being done cheaply. The proportions of the windows to the solid piers, the quality of the roof lantern, the choice of a floor that can handle plants and traffic, all of these separate a genuine orangery from a glorified extension. Underfloor heating makes it a true all-year room; good ventilation, ideally through opening roof lights, keeps it from overheating.

Plant it generously, because the orangery without plants forgets what it is for. Large potted specimens, the descendants of those original citrus trees, give the room its character and its history in one gesture. Get the balance of glass, stone and greenery right, and you have a room that earns its keep every day of the year.

An old idea, better than ever

The orangery has returned because it solves a problem we still have: how to bring light and greenery and a sense of the garden into a home that must also work through a northern winter. Its ancestors solved it for citrus; we solve it for ourselves, building the room not to overwinter fruit but to overwinter our own spirits in the low, grey months when a flood of light is worth almost anything.

Planting it, and the history it carries

An orangery without plants has forgotten its own name, and the most rewarding examples treat the planting as the whole reason for the room rather than as decoration added at the end. The direct descendants of those original citrus trees remain the classic choice, a pair of lemons or oranges in large terracotta pots, glossy and fragrant, which can be wheeled out to the terrace in high summer and brought back under glass before the first cold nights, exactly as their ancestors were. Around them, the room takes larger specimens happily: an olive, a bay, a big-leaved fig, plants that want light and shelter and give the space the green, slightly wild atmosphere that makes an orangery feel alive rather than merely built.

To plant one is to take part in a long and rather grand tradition. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century orangeries of the great estates were, in effect, the first serious attempts to grow tender exotics through a northern winter, and they drove real advances in glazing, heating and horticulture. The tender fruit they protected was a genuine luxury, and the building that protected it was a boast made in stone and glass. The modern orangery inherits that lineage even when it holds nothing rarer than a few pots of herbs and a lemon tree, and there is a quiet pleasure in knowing it. The room that draws your family to its light on a grey afternoon is doing exactly what it was invented to do three centuries ago: keeping something tender and precious alive through the dark months, whether that something is a citrus tree or simply the spirits of the people sitting among the leaves.

Substantial, light-filled and genuinely usable, the orangery is the garden room grown up, and its revival is thoroughly deserved. For more on the rooms that connect a home to its garden and its light, our Homes & Culture edit keeps making the case for architecture that lets the outside in.