Alitex HQ and Factory

Alitex make their glasshouses in Hampshire, in a factory you can actually visit — which already sets them apart. The showroom sits on the same site: several structures standing in a proper garden, arranged as if they'd always been there rather than staged for a trade floor. You walk around them in the spring air and the differences between the models become physical rather than theoretical.

The Victorian range is the one you already know, the one with the ridge finial and the decorative cresting along the roofline. In white, against a cloudy April sky, it has a particular quality — more substantial than its footprint suggests, because the proportions are exact. Stone base, gravel surround, a pair of terracotta pots at the entrance. The door was open.

Inside one of the black-framed models, seedlings were already well underway — rows of small pots on a gravel bench, a wicker basket in the corner, and outside the glass, trees just coming into leaf. The black frame makes the glass feel like a series of windows more than a wall. Everything visible through it looks composed.

The showroom lean-to was the unexpected part. Attached to a brick building and fitted out as a room: dark teal walls, a floral armchair, a log burner, botanical prints framed on the wall. A citrus tree in a terracotta pot bearing small orange fruit stood in the corner. Cast iron floor grilles. It looked less like aspirational staging and more like somewhere a person had actually been sitting that morning.

Beyond the showrooms, a proper cottage garden: raised beds still full of white and yellow daffodils, with vegetable markers pressed into the soil for what comes next. Peas, radishes, spinach. April light over all of it.

And then the factory — the actual making. Sheets of aluminium, extrusions, the precision of the joints. Seeing how things are put together changes what you see when you look at the finished thing.