“Spending all our time creating beautiful gardens for our clients, we suddenly realised that our own small Victorian courtyard needed to be brought up to date.
“The garden was on two levels so needed to be reduced to one to make the space more usable, which took many days’ work and skips to achieve.
“Clearance is often an underestimated part of a garden build. Where did all this stuff come from? It gave us both an insight into the disruption one must endure in order to create something wonderful and new. We both agreed that the end result more than compensated for the temporary inconvenience.
“With little time to maintain the garden we decided that the wow would come from a dramatic piece of art, and the planting would be subtle, using a palette of green and white with a splash of mauve so as not to compete for attention.
“We chose a contemporary white stone in Jura grey from London Stone, and the fencing, which we painted ebony, comes from Jacksons. The original walls were brick, which in the Victorian era were given to apprentices to build to practise their techniques.
“The time had come for something more modern, so we built new walls, which we rendered and painted in Farrow & Ball Hague Blue No 30. The blend of old – the house – and new is complementary, as great care was taken to ensure the effect was not jarring.
“We both love the sound of water and wanted to include a water feature, but with so little space it needed to be minimal in style as we already had one big focal point in the garden.
“Lighting has been used sparingly to showcase the garden after dark, keeping in mind that less is more when it comes to lights.
“We love our new space and are now able to offer bespoke garden artwork. Our in-house artist is available to take commissions and create individual one-off pieces tailored to your specifications.
“We enjoyed every moment of our garden build and continue to be delighted by the reactions of friends and family as they express their amazement at the total transformation of our small outside space.”
Lorraine
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