Arts & Crafts Garden Design, Buckinghamshire
BRIEF
Our clients wanted to completely reshape the garden surrounding their beautiful Arts & Crafts house in Buckinghamshire, creating somewhere better suited to the next stage of their lives.
With their children leaving home, the emphasis was shifting towards relaxation, entertaining and a greater amount of planting. The brief included new entertaining areas and a large wildlife-friendly pool. With more time on their hands they also wanted to include a kitchen garden with raised beds for growing fruit, herbs and vegetables.
At the same time, the garden held important family memories, and the clients wanted to retain selected elements with sentimental value, including a Wendy house that had been built for their children.
DESIGN SOLUTION
We developed alternative layouts and design styles before the clients selected a relaxed, flowing approach with curved paths creating a circular journey around the garden.
A new terrace combines natural stone and resin-bound gravel, creating a refined, free-draining surface while helping guide movement through the garden.
Tabletop pleached trees are planted within the terrace to cast dappled shade over the dining area and create a stronger sense of enclosure without closing the space in.
Water plays a central role. A large pool and smaller pool are connected by a stream, bringing gentle sound, reflections and movement into the landscape while supporting the more naturalistic character of the design.
Generous naturalistic planting softens the structure of the garden, while new boundary fencing and tall, bare-stem shrubs provide screening from neighbouring properties.
A carefully considered lighting scheme brings selected trees, planting and water features to life after dark and extends the experience of the garden into the evening.
The result combines contemporary garden design with sensitivity to the Arts & Crafts architecture: relaxed rather than rigid, richly planted, and designed around how the owners now want to use their garden.
Our garden designs combine contemporary garden design ideas with functionality and sensitivity to the site and architecture of the house. This contemporary garden design in the Cotswolds incorporated a combination of sharp geometry with naturalistic elements; also including a stream and reflecting pool.
