Liverpool Garden

As with all my designs the starting point came from a meeting with my clients going through likes dislikes and there own design ideas. With most of my previous designs I’ve had to tease and coax an element of my own artistic licence into the them.
However, this design proved a to be a design that suited my own style and the clients. As you can see from the images the house has its own striking elements. The interior uses clean straight lines with perfectly proportioned curves to move a person through the building. These forms and lines are echoed in the exterior of the building giving it a real sense of Bauhaus design specification. My brief was simple; to continue these design elements into the garden.
My clients had some requests that needed to be implemented. The use or water, a lawn and a colour pallet to match the exterior of the house [shades of greys and whites]. Colour was to be kept to a minimum even with the horticultural aspect of the garden, to ensure little if anything distracted from the line and forms to be used to mimic the interior and exterior of the house.
The garden is a basic rectangle measuring measuring 20 by 25 meters with a minimal drop of 200mm from back to front. And once cleared had a number on protected trees predominately around the perimeter. These only caused issues with the positioning of the lawn areas to ensure its exposure to the sun.
The design begins when stepping out onto the existing deck at the back of the house. All the viewing aspects are from the kitchen area and living room areas. Focusing the attention to the centre and back left of the garden. The rill is used to draw the eye to the centre of the garden. The rill is flanked with Marshalls eclipse granite stone. The simplicity of the colours and cut of the stone ensure a formal and consistent flow mimicking the deck which sandwiches the rill at either end. This then steps up and opens out in to a raised pond and deck area allowing a flow of water to run of a stainless steel spout. Moreover, I felt it vital that although a focal point does add interest and perspective I did not want to close the garden off. By off setting two-curved seating/raised bed areas a gap could be maintained behind the rill. Thus giving the garden a flow and movement not a dead end. From here the two raised beds sliced with the floating bench to added, not only as a seating area but a change in colour to almost act as an arrow pointing and guiding the viewer to the next area. Along with the Buxus Sempervirens balls giving a repetition of shape and form. The curves all though different in pitch had to mimic the curves on the exterior of the house. It was vital that as one walked through the offset concrete pergola the walls in the garden blended and matched that of the house, almost becoming an extension of the house. Indeed, the use of a window section to open up the wall to increase light also acted as a framing tool to highlight this very element of the design.
To ensure the garden was balanced I decided to continue the flow of the pergola walls with two screens dropping in height to again draw the eye to the paved area in the opposite corner. And to act as a backdrop for the Tree Fern and Cordyline.
Viewing a garden from one aspect is never an option indeed the three-dimensional aspect does not allow this. So ensuring a view from every vantage point was key. And I hope was achieved by finding the correct proportions of horizontal vertical and curved lines, balanced with form and structural mass.