Garden Sculpt A New Garden

Date Published:

09/06/2008

On a new building project the surrounding landscape is often overlooked, despite being an essential part of the design process. The garden should be as expressive as the home itself - another place to enjoy time with family and friends. Let us help you design your perfect garden.

The London Grand Designers chose garden designer Simon Thomas for their project. 'Things have changed a lot because I think the garden has become an investment,' says Simon. 'It becomes this extra room.' This is a great way to think of your garden. It will most likely be an entertainment space, like a dining room or lounge, but a common mistake is to forget about this fundamental use of your outdoor space.

A small garden can cost anything between £12,000 and £20,000 to fully design and build by professionals. If you want to spend less, then here are some trade secrets that garden designers have offered us to help you complete the job yourself:

'It's very important to try and put a garden within it's landscape, within it's borrowed landscape as we call it. One of the problems is that people tend to live in Victorian and Georgian houses and a lot of them want contemporary gardens and that can sometimes jar so you have to be a little bit respectful to the surrounding area.' - Charlotte Rowe, Landscape Gardener.

'I think the most important thing is keeping a small garden as simple as possible and never using more than three hard landscaping materials. So it might be a deck, it might be a stone, it might be a rendered wall, but no more than that. Keep the structure bold and clean because once all the planting's gone in it's going to look much, much softer.' - Simon Thomas, Garden Designer.

'One of the crucial things is to establish the rooms that lead onto the garden. It's very nice to try and make the two rooms work together, for example you could put the same colour as the work surface on the paving outside. You could then reflect the timber floor in a bench. I always ask exactly what colour they are using for the walls and I get that reference colour and try and match it outside, and that works very well in fencing and walls.' - Charlotte Rowe, Landscape Gardener.