36 Greenhouse Design Ideas That Will Inspire You

If you're a gardener, then greenhouses are a great way to extend the growing season all year so you can enjoy orchids or fruit trees or even vegetables any time of year. But greenhouses are more than just a place to grow. Whether attached to the house or designed as a separate building, greenhouses can be contemplative spaces that allow you to relish the great outdoors even in the dead of winter. Their glass windows offer an often 360-degree view of the outdoors and allow you to stay warm and toasty even when there is snow on the ground.

This sweet steel-and-glass greenhouse offers year-round gardening opportunities for residents of the Maryland manor estate adjoining it.

Atlanta couple Cary Smith and Libby Hockenberry, owners of the Victorian Atlanta, have built several small greenhouses in their backyard to allow them to experiment with new kinds of plants to sell in their plant store; this way they’re experts on everything before they try and sell them to anyone else. In this greenhouse, they leveled the ground, covered it with Indiana creek gravel and built a nurturing environment for desert plants that wouldn’t otherwise do so well in the Atlanta humidity. Tour Cary and Libby's plant-filled home in the link below.

These homeowners love all things Disney, especially Disney World's Epcot, which is home to one of the biggest flower and garden shows in the world. So, they decided to pay homage to their favorite theme park’s landmark in their backyard by installing a 22' x 11' geodesic-domed greenhouse complete with a hydroponic growing system.

A cold frame is typically a wood box with a glass or plastic lid that uses passive solar to protect plants from cold weather. It is often placed below the ground’s frost line, which also helps insulate the plants. A greenhouse can be a structure of almost any size, and although some may use passive heat sources, they often utilize electricity or gas to heat and cool the space. A cold frame is great for hardening off seedlings that you’ve grown indoors and for growing cool-weather crops in the winter. But you won’t be able to grow tropical or warm-weather plants in a cold frame in the winter months. With a climate-controlled greenhouse, you can grow a variety of plants throughout the cold weather, plus do all that a cold frame can do, too.