If you are pricing up a pergola you will have found both, often at wildly different prices, and it is not always obvious what you are paying for. Here is an honest look at how the two compare in a British garden — where the weather is the real test.
The case for timber
Timber is cheaper to buy, and a well-made timber pergola looks beautiful, particularly in an established garden where you want it to soften into the planting. If your budget is tight or you like the idea of something you can stain a different colour in a few years, timber has a genuine appeal.
What timber asks of you
The cost of timber is not really in the purchase, it is in the upkeep. Left alone in a UK climate, timber greys, splits and eventually rots where it meets the ground. Keeping it right means re-treating it every year or two, and posts set into the ground are the first thing to go. It is not difficult work, but it is work, every year, forever.
Why they are manufactured in aluminium
- It does not rot, warp or swell. Rain, frost and heat do not move it, which matters more here than in a drier climate.
- The colour is factory-applied. Our frames are powder-coated in the factory, not painted on site, so there is nothing to re-coat as the years pass.
- It is strong for its weight. That is what allows a louvred roof to open and close overhead, and what lets a frame span a wider opening without a forest of posts.
The part timber cannot do
This is the real dividing line. A bioclimatic pergola has a roof of louvres that rotate — open for sun, closed for a shower, angled for shade — and on the motorised models that happens at the touch of a button. That mechanism needs a rigid, dimensionally stable frame with engineered moving parts. It is not something a timber structure can offer.
So which should you buy?
If you want a simple, inexpensive garden feature and you do not mind maintaining it, timber is a perfectly reasonable choice. If you want an outdoor space you will actually use in changeable weather, with a roof you can control and nothing to repaint, that is what an aluminium bioclimatic pergola is for. See the models or talk to us about your garden.