Design Course Part 2: SORTING THE SPACES

this is part two of our garden design series and this is about sorting the spaces within the garden and i think this is the bit that people find really difficult so i brought you to a client's garden where we're totally reconfiguring the spaces how you divide the spaces is really i think whether the garden works or not that's the most crucial thing always to remember a good example of dividing spaces is in my late mother's garden which i transformed from working rough ground into a series of cohesive spaces for the front entrance i created a simple sunken west facing terrace to catch the evening sun and defined it with topri her passion and the south facing back garden i changed far more dramatically with over a metre level change i designed a terraced lawn as the breathing space and made wide raised beds around the wall adding a serpentine curve along the front of the terrace softens the retaining wall the all-important dining area effectively became sunken which helps shelter it and creates a feeling of coziness and further divines the area the informal but widespread planting and scattered box balls help soften this highly useful but quite large paved area to the back of the house was an area of rough ground which i turned into yet another more intimate courtyard this garden visually floods into the house with the huge glazed barn doors i sectioned off a small eating area with bleached hormones to create a more intimate feel and make a very different more shady space it really doesn't matter whether you're working on a huge garden or a tiny garden the principles are exactly the same you want to divide up the spaces and you want to make all those spaces different you want them to have a good purpose you want them to look good and they've got to really function well that's what it's all about getting your different spaces to really sing [Music] when i start a job i always look at what is the most dominant features within the garden obviously your house is one big feature and any other eyesores or dominant features because even if you make a garden truly beautiful if you've got a big ugly feature within it your eye will go to that it will always go to the ugliest thing with this house the dominant feature is the adjacent house it really seems to overwhelm it and it's made worse because the driveway comes in via that house so what i've done is i've totally reversed the entrance instead of coming here i'm removing all this entrance way and i'm coming down the side of the house because the other thing is in this case the biggest garden the west facing garden where you get all the evening light is just taken up with gravel drive and do you really want to look at a load of cars parking in your garden all the time or would you rather see garden i know what i want and the client knew what they want so we're removing all this and then in the eight metres of driveway i can actually plant a very effective screen so you won't be aware of this house at all i think most people would have actually put the driveway and the car park in that position because they always think they want to get within inches of the front door and that you can't walk any distance at all but really that's absurd nowadays we have so many cars i think if you're able to you want to make sure that you can hide them or screen them or make them in a part of the garden that doesn't impinge on the rest of the garden and so often with gardens i do we end up moving the car parking because they're always right by the front door which is never in my view the best position so with the garden in wisnine the cars went right up to the front door but actually what we did is we made the car parking back from the front door we made a special courtyard and we made it look as though you couldn't drive on it but if you actually came back from shopping with lots of parcels and it was really you could do that you could park your car there and then move it back later on and i think when you've got a lovely front driveway and you've got a fabulous house visitors can come and park there sometimes you can make it fine for them but not for your regular everyday cars that are sat there all the time so what am i going to do with this sea of gravel on this garden if we're not going to have cars there well i'm making a courtyard in front of the house by the front door and we're having an area of paving now people will park in their new parking space and they'll go through a hornbeam archway to the front door but if you're using this west facing space in the evening probably when you get lots of sun then you will actually hear people coming so it's quite nice to have that little buffer just a gate and an archery between you and a new arrival all the delivery vans that will come down the back drive and they will probably put the parcels by the back door and in fact most friends will use the back door often the front door is used quite rarely in my case at home the only thing that people use people who use the front door is when they're electioning and we get loads of election leaflets by the front door which we find three months later and that is the case with many front doors they're not used every day on one garden i did not far from here the case was quite strange the whole garden was in the front of the house was no rear garden and there were three doors on the front elevation so every time a delivery man came to one door and knocked the owner would go and open another door and it was a bit like a fast because they never sort of caught up with each other so the difference there was that we had to make the front door the prominent feature because that was the door we wanted everyone to go to so for that what were really mean narrow steps we made into big wide planted steps we put a big hornbeam arch over the door and then we disguised the other two doors so one of the doors had mean steps going up to it but we actually put a balcony from that door so you couldn't get to it at all and we made a lovely raised platform out of decking where you could sit and look over the garden and the third door on that elevation we just put a screen of pleached trees which also served to form a screen from their neighbours so you didn't actually see the back door until you clocked the front door and went there and then the whole of that garden had to be divided up into spaces they had two very active young boys so we put a trampoline hidden behind hedges in one area we put a tree house hidden up in the existing mature tree in another space we did a terrace all the way along the front of the house which we divided up into an eating area and then the balcony over the top and then we put in grass lawn we put a little central pool as a focal point and an arbor going down to look at from the front door to the back of the garden so it really was a sort of play area come entrance area come garden all in this quite small front space which we divided up to those different needs we've got something like over two meters gradient which we've found from the survey from the front door to the top of the bank at the top we've got this fantastic asset of these big mature sycamores which form a sort of curve around the top of the garden they give the plot a real sense of maturity they've got tree preservation orders on them anyway so we couldn't remove them unless we applied for special permission and they form a lovely focal point people always assume that trees are sacrosanct you really can't move them but actually people do plant trees in the most extraordinary places i've had monkey puzzles which go to massive heights three meters from the back door you have trees like cherry trees which are short-lived and they're showing sign of disease and they're always reluctant to move them in this case we were lucky and actually there's very few trees of any that will move only tiny ones but we did move a lot of hedges there were a lot of new hedges which is where the new entrance air is going to be they'd only been there for about eight years so he took a chance and we've lifted them and we've moved them all to form a screen on the boundary and i think that's worked really well we've moved them with a little mini digger and we've got a beautiful instant hedge and if we water it for a few months it should really establish well and so we've got extra plants for free in effect but just be careful with trees don't assume that they're the best tree for the plot that you should keep them or that they're in the right place because often they aren't and what i often do is put in new trees and when they've come up then i take out the old trees so we are actually terracing the garden because we've got that over two meter slope we're making the courtyard at the bottom where you can sit and enjoy the evening sun then we'll have steps going up to a lawn and then we'll have more going up to a plateau at the top with a focal point of a lovely big curved seat up underneath the trees which you might not go and sit there that often but it'll be something to look at and admire we might make it a swing seat or something like that so you can look down at the house at my own house the case was slightly different the whole entrance yard was a big far mile with a lot of concrete and it was one huge space so i put in stone piers with the new hedging to semi-divide it i like the feel of the lovely big yard but i wanted a more domestic area that we could sit and use and eat in and things and i wanted it separate from the main arrival courtyard where people came arrive parked and clocked where to go and i think that sort of hard screen with the peers and the you hedges is a really nice way to divide up two different spaces and yet you've still got the whole space because you see them all together but you've got total privacy in the courtyard by the house so a fundamental point is to get your survey put tracing paper over the top and divide it up into the different spaces with pencil trial and error try all different ways you could do a million things on that plot and you want the best make sure you hide the eyesores if you can or screen them make sure you really big up the big features make sure you have the parking in the place that makes the garden really work and make sure you get everything in that design that you want [Music] this is going to be the most used part of the garden and you might think that's strange but a house is being changed slightly the bowie window is coming out and french windows two sets are going in and because most people now live in the kitchen they want to be able to open the doors and have easy access onto their most used space and i find that if you actually don't have any access to the garden from the house you never use that part of the garden or very rarely so you want to really make sure that your most used living room does have easy access this end of the house doesn't look beautiful i would say so what we're going to do is we're going to put a canopy coming all the way along the elevation with posts going down so it'll make a covered space underneath it which you can use from the kitchen and then at either end it one end will get the west facing sun so that won't have the canopy and at the other end we'll have the east facing sun for breakfast and that won't have the canopy either so they've got three options they've got morning sun evening sun and then covered for when it gets too sunny or more likely rainy and then we're going to have an outdoor fireplace under the canopy and this level will go all through it one level and at the far end where it drops down quite markedly we'll have railings around it so you can lean on the railings and look at the lovely view and i think for a central town garden to have the view of all those bosque trees is wonderful then of course you've got a very strange shaped space here and i'm trying to actually mask the surrounding building so we'll have screening trees over there which will hide the house we'll have pleach trees in that side which will screen those houses and then we'll have a bit of lawn and then we'll have a bit of orchard at the end it will be fairly low maintenance the clients aren't great gardeners and they've got a huge dog and the dog is really more of a priority than the garden so i've got to keep the planting simple robust strong i've got this to make the spaces work architecturally and i've got to make them work physically and i'm trying to flatter the house and make it look much better than it does at the moment which is always a top priority and i think with your garden design you can change the whole look of a house by adding bits to it by changing paint colors by putting trees in front so all sorts of strategies at my own house when you arrive to the gap in the buildings into the entrance courtyard the first thing you saw was the dove cut and then behind it was an extension built in the 60s with a flat roof and there was a car parking space in that slot and it just looked nice or it looked totally inappropriate it was a bad extension and so i put the trellis in front of it and i put some pleached hornbeam trees behind the trellis so you actually try and hide that whole flat roof extension in the wall garden when you walked into there the first thing you would see was the extension the sixties accenture with a flat roof that just dominated the whole of the wall garden so i put two sets of hornbeam walkways down each side returning round the corners and that just knocks out the whole of the flat roof you don't notice at all and your eye is focused on the end of the garden and so you can make the garden look attractive but you could never have done that if you still saw that flat roof extension i did the hornby around both sides because i sometimes think it's obvious if you just have one big screen line then you think oh is there something nasty behind there and i thought to just balance it up because it's a fairly symmetrical rectilinear space anyway made sense and i think it works quite well at mary berries the isil was the tennis court which we hid but also the terrorists didn't run along the length of the house now most people like a long terrorist they want to access it from different places she accessed it from the orangery from her kitchen from another living room so it made sense just to dig out the whole stretch and make one lovely long big terrace and that totally changed the whole feel of the house it gave it a lovely spacious outdoor room for her and we put in french doors from the kitchen so when she's baking cakes and things you can just pop outside have a cup of coffee while they're cooking in the oven or whatever always be aware of the orientation basically if you're at work all day and you come home in evening if you've got a west facing garden that you can use where you've got the sun that's obviously in uk then that's a great place for it if you can you can't always make it work like that our main paved area is actually on the north elevation but then we see the sun moving from the west to the east so you get the evening sun glancing across the end of it and actually we can use that that paved area most of the time and we do get quite a bit of light there because it's only a single story building at that point but just bear in mind the elevation the sun the south side can sometimes be too hot with climate change and you will probably need shade and it's quite nice to have some cooler areas as well when you work out your main paved area you want to decide how big it is and i think people usually put down a few slabs because they move into a place they have lots of money to spend on roofs on the house the kitchen and so the garden gets a pretty mean slice of it to start with but you really do want a bigger space the bigger makes it look more generous makes it look more in keeping with the house and i often think four meters is actually a minimum width and quite often they might well be double that or more and the bigger the house the bigger the paved area needs to be to look in proportion to the house i think it doesn't mean to say it's got to be all sterile paving you can still put trees in baseless pots you can put plants in the paving but the courtyard area wants to feel generous and i always like to put planting at the bottom of the house i think if you've got paving stones going right up to the end elevation it does look quite hard but if you've got planting there it helps anchor the garden to the house now obviously i'm breaking that rule here because i've got a canopy over the top but i'll probably put plants along the outer edge of the canopy to soften it so when you look back at the house you still get that softening effect and they'll probably be quite big plants in big baseless pots so this is going to become the main car parking yard but it's going to look good we're going to put a stone wall around two sides of it to contain it we're going to do a pattern within the gravel so it looks like a rectilinear courtyard and we're going to put some trees in the corners to soften it and planting in front of the house to soften that the dip in levels which you can see at the far bottom is just a localized dip so i'm bringing that level up so it's not all so sloping and uneven it will be a nice gradual slope down to that space and you'll be able to get four or five cars in there quite easily with a decent amount of turning so it'll be a well used area it'll have great connection to the back door which is tucked around the side of the house now and also be easy to access the front door through the hornbeam arch in the hedge which we're going to put there decorative hedges arches and burglars are a great way to divide spaces in this london garden i've used you hedging and pathways to create distinct areas with a very different feel in my new design i want to keep the side pathway natural the side bit is really two or three meters wide so it's not a lot of ground it's sloping and it's quite an awkward space so all we're going to do is plant a few trees with low ground cover under because it will just be a route between one part of the garden and the next but will also help buffer the building next door so you keep that lovely bosque feel you feel around the far side of the house we'll hope to carry that on round so you won't see a load of boundaries it'll be more trees and hedge we've also borrowed the landscape on that side to the east of the house where you've got the beautiful panoramic views of the trees on surrounding gardens we've borrowed that and really made it flood into the garden by removing that shelter that blocks it out at the moment this london garden feels far bigger than it is as i connected it up to the adjoining woodland and hit the boundary just as private but a great borrowed landscape borrowing the adjoining landscape if it is easy on the eye is always a great design trick and in my own garden i've used the same strategy to bring in the beautiful surrounding countryside views so when you start redesigning your plot do keep an open mind is the access in the best place is the car parking in the best place can you remove the eye source can you really up the big features that are there the good features have you made that garden work with how you use the house so it's got great connectivity between inside and out and are you making it a garden dividing up into spaces that you have a lot of useful and a lot of purpose for and that look [Music] beautiful

Channel: Bunny Guinness

Views: 30,259

Rating: 4.9764152 out of 5

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Id: lHBR5SmsK24

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021