DESIGN: Thyme Part 3 Cookery School & Farmhouse Gardens

[Music] i'm here at time an idyllic village within a village in the heart of the cotswolds it consists of a boutique hotel a restaurant a spa a cookery school a farm and the gardens [Music] my brief was to follow the ethos of time which is a love of the land and nature all of the gardens i've designed around the buildings are aimed to be outdoor rooms so there's effortless connectivity between the inside and the out this is the farmhouse and this has gardens at the back west facing and at the front east facing and because we love to connect the inside and the out when this new kitchen extension was put on we made a sitting area both here so you can enjoy the evening sun and out to the front so you can have the morning sun and that really makes a huge difference to the use of these really important spaces we wanted to make a nice generous space but we didn't want to make it too sparse so we put in four baseless potted trees around us these lovely amelanchia would just give greenery and stop it looking all too hard behind me is the bull court or petunk court where the french have that wonderful game where you actually roll a ball along and the aim is to hit a little ball and that's made of breed and gravel and i think it's a wonderful material because it's gravel but it's bound so when you walk on it even with very high shoes they don't sink into it you can ride bicycles on it wheelchairs or whatever and what i like about it is it looks quite soft although it's a hard surface i've edged it with a crenelated edge of yorkstone slabs and i think that just helps to define it and i've also put a low retaining wall around it i've used the low part to be just random rubble walling in keeping with the whole of the farmhouse and the rest of it but i put a new modern thick ashler coping sawn coping on the top to make it look a bit more modern again mixing modern with old the lawn i think is just a wonderful space but i wanted just to egg it up a little bit now stepping stones paths we have in many many gardens but you can really make them any width you like you can make them a brick or stone or pebbles or gravel you can make them of different patterns and here i've done simple crosses with horizontals but again ringing the changes making them individual making them inviting i think it really adds just an extra dimension to otherwise a very simple lawn the seats framed by the estate fencing big chunky wooden seats with the spell ears around the back are custom made seats obviously and i do like to use custom-made furniture people always think that it's very expensive but inevitably it's nearly always much less expensive than buying something off the peg and also you can bring any amount of changes to the design and gardens like to have their own identity things that people remember and if you've seen the same seat or art or whatever in 101 different gardens it really doesn't make the same impact at all a bit of individualism is always good so i think those seats work very well and we put in the box spools at either end and i see they've now grown massively since i last saw them we probably did this garden about six seven years ago something like that and they've really bedded in the lawn is actually a very simple space but by having those seats and the path it just lifts it not a lot of expense but it just completely transforms it now the front of the house is another element and we did massive work to that we changed the position of the drive we made a more open part as you come up to the house with just simple meadows flanking the drive with topri orchard trees which we bought in and a hammock free so that was all very relaxed and then you come into a more defined courtyard right up by the front door and that you can drive into to drop off your suitcases and then you pull your car back because we've got the all-important eating area to one side there so we've tried to make it car free and make it more like a courtyard the hammock creek was fun to do because there were no trees in that garden at all so i had to bring in some fruit trees which i formed in a circle around the hammock creek and those obviously would not take the weight when they're newly planted of a big human being having had a lovely meaty lunch or dinner lying in them so i actually put in metal posts tied up to the trunks one on either side of the hammock and i fixed the hammocks to those so they form a loose circle around a fire pit the fruit trees are one of my favorite type of fruit trees they're multi-stem medlers so they have the wonderful spring blossom and then they have the extraordinary fruits with the calyx at the bottom that look a bit like a whippet's bottom in the last 10 or maybe even 20 years outdoor sofas have really revolutionized the way we use our gardens and that's because as opposed to a garden bench which you tend to sit on for a short while because it's pretty hard and pretty uncomfortable you can lounge on a sofa all day after lunch you have a nap on it you can read on it they're just so comfortable and you don't have to make them of all weather rashan here these are made of timber bespoke timber really chunky and quite wide so really if you haven't got an outdoor sofa in your garden i think if you find one that you like or design one that you like if you put one in or two even or a couple of armchairs you will really discover how your use of the garden totally changes this is the garden for the cookery school at time and this was the first commercial garden that i designed here and i think it must have been about 12 years ago when i was coming up for a theme for this garden it seemed pretty obvious culinary food plants so that's what it is the main star players are the olive trees and these are grown on short legs so they're dumpy little trees because most of the buildings around here are just single stories so it brings the scale down but they really work in making the space look much bigger than it really is because i can't see from one end to the other vines i put a big vine scrambling all over the pergola lovely grapes hanging down we've got rosemary lovely evergreen plants very aromatic we've got artichokes and time both prostrate and also the more bushy times very edible very obvious palette to use and i think it really pulls the scheme together when i came to dividing up the actual spaces how was i going to do it that's always the most difficult part but this fell into line very easily it was just a flat space pretty much with a load of gravel and hardcore so what we did is did a main entrance path up to the main doors the center quite wide quite generous in scale so it didn't feel pinched and mean and then we had a big eating area under the pergola so big groups of classes can sit and eat and chat together in the shade sometimes we put an awning over the top as well and then i've got the little informal seating areas so two or three can just have private chats together so everything in this courtyard is very straight rettling here because it's a rectilinear space but i do like to take people off the straight and narrow a bit so i've thrown in the serpentines i've done serpentine curves flanking the pathway and i love the serpentine because it's a very classical shape and i think it works brilliantly with straight lines strangely enough and i've egged it up by having the cloud pruned hedge in the box running along in a serpentine as well as the palette and materials i've tried to keep that quite restricted as ever so i've gone for the green oak which has faded beautifully over the 12 years or so i've gone for the acid etch metal and this gray palette really bounces off light in the winter and when you get the sort of grey dust in the days in england when the skies are murky the light is low this metal really sings out and looks almost sparkly which really adds a different dimension i think and then of course stone everywhere here in the cotswolds there's stone so we've got stone paving and we've got some granite set as well terracotta terracotta and the acid etch metal and the dark green and the silver gray it all is a good tone that themes well together then you come to the raised beds i mean it just seemed natural to put in raised beds so people cooking could go and just pick their own herbs we've got lots of lemon verbena and an array of all different herbs they can just sit on the edge of the raised beds look at the herbs discuss them pick them and then go and use them again all important structure and i think this garden in the winter has a very strong structure and because all the buildings around it have lots of glazing the interface between the two means that this space has got to look good as ever all the year around because it's really the picture postcard that you see from the building you

Channel: Bunny Guinness

Views: 27,150

Rating: 4.9628944 out of 5

Keywords: Thyme Village, Bunny Guinness, Thyme cookery School, garden stepping stones, lawn design, contemporary garden eating area, topiary, The Farmhouse at Thyme, Thyme Oxford, Thyme Southrop, Boules court, garden furniture design, garden design, espalier seats, espaliers, courtyard, trees in baseless pots, designing front entrance, designing front garden, outdoor rooms, kitchen garden, entertaining garden, yew, designing a patio

Id: l-_dxd4l12w

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2020