A garden games room is one of the few uses where the furniture decides the building. A pool or snooker table has a playing area and a cue clearance around it, and the second number is the one people forget. Get the clearance wrong and you have a beautiful room in which half the shots have to be played with a short rest, which is a mistake that cannot be fixed afterwards.
Clearance is the number that sets the footprint
Around any table you need room to draw a cue back on every side, and that clearance is close to the length of a cue rather than an arm. Take the table's outside dimensions, add that clearance all round, and that is the internal clear floor area before anything else goes in the room. Working the other way, from the room to the table, is how people end up with a table one size too big.
The table has to get in, which is not obvious
A slate bed table arrives in pieces and the pieces are heavy and rigid. Door width, the route across the garden and any step or turn on the way in all matter, and it is far easier to fit a wider door or plan a temporary opening at build stage than to discover the problem on delivery day. Ask the table supplier for the section sizes before the room is designed.
Floor and levels
Slate beds are heavy and they are levelled once. A floor that settles unevenly puts the table out of level, which is immediately obvious in play. That points at a concrete base and at a floor finish that will not creep, and away from anything soft laid over a suspended deck.
Lighting is not an afterthought
Table games need even light over the playing surface with no shadow from the player and no glare off the cloth. That means a low, wide fitting over the table rather than downlights in the ceiling, and it means the position of that fitting is fixed by the table, so the wiring has to be run to it during the build rather than added later.
Questions people ask about garden games room
What size garden room do I need for a pool table?
It depends entirely on the table. Work from the table's outside dimensions plus a full cue clearance on all four sides, and treat that as the internal clear area. British and American tables of the same nominal size have different dimensions, so use the real ones.
Can I have a bar in the same room?
Yes, and it competes for the clearance rather than for the floor. Anything along a wall reduces the space a cue can be drawn back into, so bars, seating and shelving belong at the ends of the room or in a recess rather than along the long sides.
Does a games room need heating?
If a slate table lives in it, yes. Slate is stable but the cloth and the timber frame are not, and a room that swings between damp cold and warm dry is hard on both. Background heat costs less than recovering a cloth.