Garden room

Generally they are regarded as different from terraces and patios just outside a building, although in practice these are often the parts of a garden that are most used as a room, with tables and chairs.

Walls and hedges may form part of the boundaries of a garden room, but plants, usually at least a few feet tall, will do as well.

In steep Italian gardens they often included the borrowed scenery of a view over the surrounding landscape.

These cabinets usually centred on some feature of interest, such as a statue, fountain, tree or piece of topiary.

The leading French textbook of the period, La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage, by Dezallier d'Argenville (1709) illustrates plans for more modest but still complicated "Cabinets et Salons pour des bosquets" with benches and central features of fountains, small trees, or topiary, and between one and four ways in.

d'Argenville shows all the entries as straight walks, but the English gardens illustrated by Jan Kip around 1705–1720 often show curving paths leading to the rooms inside the "quarters" of a wilderness, which would make the occupants invisible until a new person was very close; an example is Castle Howard.

[18] Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, designed by Beatrix Farrand from 1922 onwards, is a larger garden (27 acres) laid out "as a series of outdoor rooms".