Modern courtyard garden design with lush shady planting scheme in Sutton, UK.
This Victorian house in Sutton is sited in an awkward shady garden that is wider than it is long.
The owners had come across other contemporary garden designs by award winning garden expert Alice Bowe and were impressed enough to commission us for their own garden in the Midlands. The brief was to create a tranquil outdoor space for entertaining, with lush, sensuous planting and clean, modern lines.
A large, contemporary kitchen with locally sourced limestone flooring and oak counters had been fitted in the house, with french doors opening out onto the garden. The new garden design created an ‘outdoor room’ which linked the two areas together – creating view out of the kitchen and a real sense of flow.
The locally sourced construction materials used inside the house became a motif of the new garden design, with an expanse of oak decking relieved by shafts of pale limestone on the lower level – and limestone paving and gravel intercepted by oak walkways on the upper level. The two areas of the garden were linked by a deep blue pool which jutted out onto the lower terrace in the form of a cascading water feature.
Three terraces were created – the main terrace was designed for large scale entertaining close to the kitchen, whilst two other small terraces provided somewhere cocooned to escape to and relax with a book, and somewhere for an informal evening G&T...
The planting was kept restrained, lush and simple in this Sutton garden design. To complement the mature 30m high trees on the bounday, tall screens of yellow stemmed bamboo bordered the courtyard whilst, cloud planting of box delineated the internal structure of the garden. Small multistem trees, chosen for their love of a dappled woodland habitat, punctuated the design and were underplanted by swathes of an architectural evergreen woodland grass. The lime tones of this textural grass complimented the colour palette of the planting scheme perfectly. Three types of hosta with contrasting size leaves completed the simple lush planting design.
These modern courtyard gardens are under construction in Sutton, UK
Size: 200m2
Value: TBC
