Oliver Borrow: Garden Party
Garden designer Oliver Borrow creates a stylish family garden from a client’s brief
I am just adding the finishing touches to one of my latest projects; it has gone really well. A sensible budget and friendly clients with their own great style but also open to ideas has given me the perfect blend to create a sleek and stylish family garden.
The brief
It is important when setting out to create a garden that I get the brief right. This involves sitting down with the client and making a list of all the things they want to get from the garden. In this instance they were a young family; the parents being young and trendy needed a stylish garden where they could have friends round or eat alfresco-style in the evenings. However, we needed to make sure the space was safe for the kids and still had room for a bouncy castle!
Concept
How is the finished garden going to look and feel? To establish this I always have a quick peak around the house and look at what styles and colours the clients like. This project was going to lead out from a beautifully clean and minimal kitchen through bi-fold doors into the space. The house and clients had a cool and contemporary style with some splashes of colour and fun added in. It was therefore important to bring this style out into their new garden.
The design
Drawing a design and paying a garden designer like me may feel like a luxury, but if it creates an extra room in your home which you get pleasure from for years to come it may well be worth the outlay. Through the process of drawing up a space you are forced to consider every little detail.
This means that the finished product not only looks but feels right. In this garden I worked off a magic set of measurements that were all multiples of three. Having everything set to these measurements has given the whole project uniformity without being boring. I used straight lines to give a modern structure to the garden and then filled the carefully positioned raised beds with bright red and clean white flowers.
Two water features which can be seen from the house add some stylish fun to the space; the water is lit up by little LED lights as it falls over the stainless steel shafts and onto some white pebbles.
Two rooms in one
Not only did we create an extra room to the living space by adding seating and lighting to the garden but we also added a fully insulated garden pod with its own electricity, heating and bi-fold patio doors. These garden rooms fit into the garden and can be used as offices, gyms, games rooms or anything you like. They can even have showers and toilets and the best thing is they don’t usually need planning permission!
The finished product
Towards the end of any project I always feel a mix of excitement
and anxiety about how the garden will be received. Luckily I have never had a client dislike one yet! It was even more of a worry on this project as the clients had gone away on holiday and returned to our finished garden, so I was delighted and relieved to hear: “it’s even better than we expected!” when the clients returned. One of the guys on site even got an excited hug!
For a consultation about how we can embark on a special design project for you then please call Oliver on 07773 764 212. We are happy to come and have a free
chat with you about how we can help create your dream garden.
