Creating ideas for family gardens offers much potential for coming up with imaginative layouts, but quite often, especially in urban environments, space is invariably a premium, which can severely limit the scope for new layouts. In such instances, space being valuable, the challenge for creating new ideas, is less straightforward, often challenging the designer, to make full use of all space, yet ensure the end result is essentially practical but also very appealing.
Most family gardens, share common requirements, space for children and pets to play, space for adults to sit and relax, space for storing garden essentials such as lawn mowers, furniture etc, space for plants which attract interest but require little attention to maintain. Often the garden being compact, means most if not everything is visible in an open aspect layout, which is why it is important not only to consider boundary elements like walls and sheds but colour too, which can dramatically affect the overall mood and harmony.
In this project, the design sought to keep layouts practical yet distinctive with colour and geometric lines combining to create an inviting soft atmosphere, where space appeared to expand and uncluttered. Soft warm tones of the natural sandstone blended harmoniously with the painted background, allow plant forms and sizes to provide a more vivid contrast. The garden storage blended almost seamlessly into the background, providing a very unobtrusive backdrop to display the Dicksonia Antarctica, tree fern. At night, LED lighting was also used to good effect to illuminate specific plants and create additional drama and enjoyment of the garden area.