Flintshire firm using aircraft engineering in garden rooms reports 25% sales jump
A Pen-y-ffordd garden rooms company has reported a 25% increase in year-on-year turnover after investing £500,000 to transform a former farmyard into a purpose-built showroom centre.
Rubicon Garden Rooms, founded by aircraft engineer John Lyon, has taken on four new members of staff in the past 12 months and now employs 20 people at its site near the Flintshire and Cheshire border.
Mr Lyon said the new showroom had been the main driver of the growth.
“This time this year compared to this time last year we are at about a 25 per cent increase in turnover,” he said.
“I put the majority of that down to the fact that we have this new show centre.”
The site, which Mr Lyon describes as allowing customers to “stand in, walk in, touch and feel, just like they do with a car in a car showroom,” will be known as The Village when fully completed this summer.
It replaces the company’s former premises in Shotton, and is positioned one mile from the A55.
Rubicon builds garden rooms for use as home offices, annexes, gyms, spas and entertainment spaces, using techniques Mr Lyon developed from his background in aircraft engineering.
Mr Lyon said the buildings cost roughly half the price of a traditional extension, and that demand for annexes for older relatives had become one of the company’s main growth areas.
His son Rob Lyon, who joined the company in 2021 as sales and marketing manager, said the firm was drawing customers from a 70-mile radius covering North Wales, Manchester, Stoke, Liverpool and the Wirral.
Ken Skates MS, the Welsh Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Transport and North Wales, visited the Pen-y-ffordd site as part of a tour of businesses in the area.
Mr Skates said: “Rubicon has grown and has a fantastic history and a great back story.”
“They provide vital employment opportunities to dozens of people and they really are at the forefront of this particular sector.”
“Their product is saving councils and families money and it is great to see they have a strategy for growth.”
Mr Skates said the Welsh Government had established Business Wales to support small and medium-sized enterprises, and the Development Bank of Wales to address gaps in business financing.
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