Real Gardens for Real People
Nowadays many of the top garden designers seem to have lost this premise. There are more conferences planned for next year where ‘conceptualism’ is supposed to join Landscape and Garden Design in a new wave of ideas. I know that the Chelsea Flower Show is there to be taken with a pinch of salt. Like the Paris Fashion Shows, the new creations – the ridiculous hats, the teetering heels, the impossible angles – they’re all there to be adapted into a Top Shop of an outfit so the girl in the street gets a taste of Fashion. I watched that well known Irish garden designer on Channel 4 once, when he was looking for inspiration for his latest garden.
He’d had sardines on toast for lunch and was sitting toying with the empty can. The oval can proved the basis for an outdoor building, linking to an outdoor sunken patio. The programme followed the progress of the garden build and I have never forgotten the poor woman who owned the garden. Finally dragged to the back door by the over excited camera crew she looked wildly around the sardine can shaped space and said “Oh….. Where do I hang out my washing?” All power to Channel 4 for keeping the remark in the programme, but for most garden designers – your ordinary, coal face, working with real families garden designers the important things of life are not conceptualism in some fusion with minimalism, but “where do you put the bikes, the bins, the recycling, the trampoline, the shed. Indeed, where do you hang out the washing?”
In his book Church outlines four principles for his design process. They are:
- Unity, which is the consideration of the schemes as a whole, both house and garden;
- function, which is the relation of the practical service areas to the needs of the household and the relation of the decorative areas to the desires and pleasures of those who use it
- simplicity, upon which may rest both the economic and aesthetic success of the layout
- scale, which gives us a pleasant relation of parts to one another.
Our starting point for design will always be the house, the materials that have been used to build the house and the family that lives there. As a designer at Chelsea you make up your own brief so who’s going to choose a Victorian terrace on a nasty slope or a large rambling garden that’s been overgrown for 30 years? My dream brief is you. All my new clients become the next dream brief and whatever the problems to overcome, there will be wonderful things in your house and fantastic opportunities to make your garden into the place you love. Most people buy a house because they have fallen in love with it. I really like listening to that love story and seeing the things that made them say “Yes, we’ll buy this one”. It could be the views, it could be the possibilities for extending up into the roof or building on a family room at the back. It’s great to be involved in some of the projects right from the start and an increasing number of clients now call us out before they start building. Given the perfect site and budget I could do conceptualism as well as the next man. But most days – the normal workaday days – we just build real gardens for real people. Stunningly of course!
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Nowadays many of the top garden designers seem to have lost this premise. There are more conferences planned for next year where ‘conceptualism’ is supposed to join Landscape and Garden Design in a new wave of ideas. I know that the Chelsea Flower Show is there to be taken with a pinch of salt. Like the Paris Fashion Shows, the new creations – the ridiculous hats, the teetering heels, the impossible angles – they’re all there to be adapted into a Top Shop of an outfit so the girl in the street gets a taste of Fashion. I watched that well known Irish garden designer on Channel 4 once, when he was looking for inspiration for his latest garden.
He’d had sardines on toast for lunch and was sitting toying with the empty can. The oval can proved the basis for an outdoor building, linking to an outdoor sunken patio. The programme followed the progress of the garden build and I have never forgotten the poor woman who owned the garden. Finally dragged to the back door by the over excited camera crew she looked wildly around the sardine can shaped space and said “Oh….. Where do I hang out my washing?” All power to Channel 4 for keeping the remark in the programme, but for most garden designers – your ordinary, coal face, working with real families garden designers the important things of life are not conceptualism in some fusion with minimalism, but “where do you put the bikes, the bins, the recycling, the trampoline, the shed. Indeed, where do you hang out the washing?”
In his book Church outlines four principles for his design process. They are:
- Unity, which is the consideration of the schemes as a whole, both house and garden;
- function, which is the relation of the practical service areas to the needs of the household and the relation of the decorative areas to the desires and pleasures of those who use it
- simplicity, upon which may rest both the economic and aesthetic success of the layout
- scale, which gives us a pleasant relation of parts to one another.
Our starting point for design will always be the house, the materials that have been used to build the house and the family that lives there. As a designer at Chelsea you make up your own brief so who’s going to choose a Victorian terrace on a nasty slope or a large rambling garden that’s been overgrown for 30 years? My dream brief is you. All my new clients become the next dream brief and whatever the problems to overcome, there will be wonderful things in your house and fantastic opportunities to make your garden into the place you love. Most people buy a house because they have fallen in love with it. I really like listening to that love story and seeing the things that made them say “Yes, we’ll buy this one”. It could be the views, it could be the possibilities for extending up into the roof or building on a family room at the back. It’s great to be involved in some of the projects right from the start and an increasing number of clients now call us out before they start building. Given the perfect site and budget I could do conceptualism as well as the next man. But most days – the normal workaday days – we just build real gardens for real people. Stunningly of course!
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We'd love to design your garden this year. Why not find out what's really possible. Just look out of your window and imagine what you could see"