Siôn’s Bunker

We had moved back to the UK from the USA, and I missed one very specific piece of America when we came : the idea of grilling all year round. A British garden had other ideas about that, so we decided to build the grill its own room.

The Bunker

The garden (or “yard” if you’re an American) outside the kitchen window sloped, so the kitchen went into the slope in terraces, with the ground behind it at head height. It earned the nickname The Bunker, specifically “Siôn’s Bunker”. The design even allowed for machine gunner stations should the need ever arise !

A roof you can mow

The view from the kitchen window mattered, so the bunker roof became a meadow complementing the rest of our English country garden: a living roof laid over a membrane naturally with automated irrigation, with turf on top.

It looked great once the grass grew up and went feathery in the summer light and it became a natural home for the bees and the butterflies. It was such a success that I had to mow it frequently. A surreal experience.

The herbs, naturally, lived in window boxes hanging off the front of the roof, which is about as close to kitchen-to-table as growing gets.

The kitchen

Over that summer the inside came together: a sink, countertops and stainless steel work surfaces went in around the Kamado and the pizza oven.

A gorgeous live-edge oak bar went in to almost finish the job. A word or two on this. Live edge oak comes planed and smooth but full of imperfections that don’t work well with alcohol glasses and their “inebriated consumers”, so some sort of filling in is needed. Sadly the photos don’t do it justice but a lot of love went into the finished surface – black epoxy resin with gold mica flecks smoothing out the holes and splits, and the whole thing varnished with yacht varnish.

Then came the technology: Sonos speakers, motion detectors, lighting automation, the works.

The last step

Britain is not America, and so the final piece was weatherproofing, in October: grey canvas covers with clear windows, so it would work in any weather and the grilling/smoking/singing/drinking could carry on all year.

This little piece of American culture kept me going between our Illinois gig and our Georgia one where we are now. Of course when we built it, we had no idea the Deep South with its extended seasons would call so soon….

So here’s the build, including a walk round the finished kitchen. Nothing to learn here, and arguably just a gratuitous bit of nostalgia for me, but it was an important 20 square meters (or yards) of our lives for a little bit…Just goes to show, you don’t need a lot of space to be in your happy place !