This is the time of year when many of you begin work on home extensions or renovations. It is unlikely you are thinking about your garden. You may be pleased with your garden! A number of my clients, however, find that work on extensions or renovations affects the garden.
If you are extending your house, you will likely reduce the space in your garden. This might involve building a kitchen/diner into a side return. Whilst this might not initially appear to impact much on the garden, the side return often contained storage, bins, or other items that need to be rehomed elsewhere in the garden. You might be extending to the back or front, which means that existing patios, lawn or planting areas are dug up and need a rethink once the build is complete. My own extension, which included the use of diggers, new deep footings, and a lot of concrete blocks, left the back garden a sea of mud with a much-reduced patio that was no longer functional.
If you're renovating your home without an extension or any other significant build, people often feel once the renovation is completed that there is a disconnect between the new look and feel of the house and the garden. One of my clients renovated a 1980's home to modernise it and installed walls of bifolds at the rear. They then realised that the garden, which was predominantly lawn and shrubs, didn't connect well with the refurb's style and didn't pack the punch it could with the new views out of the bifolds.
So, if you're about to undergo an extension or refurbishment, keep in mind that you might want or need to redesign your garden.
If you have budget leftover from the extension or refurb, that's welcome — but for many, probably unlikely! A good garden designer, however, should be able to provide a design that can be implemented in stages when funds allow.
A garden designer can support you to think about what your priorities are.
For example, do you want to focus more on the "hard landscaping" right away? This could provide you with a new outdoor dining or cooking space that complements your brand-new kitchen. Or it could provide you with new restful seating areas to help you recover from the stress of the extension or refurb! Planting could be introduced at a more leisurely pace.
You may prefer to focus on planting as a priority to create a visual delight more quickly, which is joyful and/or soothing and lifts your spirits. You might want to prioritise making space for growing foodstuffs you use in your new kitchen.
Your priorities can be incorporated into the design and then the planning and execution of that design.
Every project starts with
an honest conversation.
Tell us what you’re thinking. We’ll tell you honestly whether — and how — we can help.