SMALL FAMILY GARDEN, RICHMOND
Our clients live in the centre of Richmond and wanted a garden space that was simple and elegant in design, but that should feel like a ‘proper’ garden, using natural materials and soft planting.
Our intention was to create a garden that reintroduced a sense of journey and discovery, and that provided areas for entertaining, playing games and relaxing, in the daytime and evening.
We created a terrace outside the kitchen, laid to a buff-coloured sandstone to complement the house brick. Elegant sandstone steps, with a bullnose edge, invite you down from the patio into the main garden. Here, a gravel path, interspersed with clay pavers, winds through generous planting and leads to a gravel seating area, featuring a beautiful wood-burning stove.
Planting is a contemporary mix of multi-textured greens, punctuated with splashes of white and purple, held together with small evergreen shrubs and a pretty multi-stem tree to add height and seasonal interest.
Treatment for the boundaries needed careful consideration and to be sympathetic to the surrounding neighbourhood – very high walls need to be graded down, privacy provided on the right and back boundaries, views opened up on the left-hand side.
The solution was a mix of long, elegant lengths of cedar batten trellis, and clipped Hornbeam pleached trees. These treatments added a contemporary, luxurious air to the space.
The glamour steps up a notch as the sun goes down, as carefully placed lighting highlights key trees and shrubs – a perfect partner to the glow of the wood-burning stove.
