Over the past eight years, it’s become clear that homeowners want to create high-end outdoor kitchens and living spaces to enable them to enjoy the outdoors. The focus here is on creating a highly usable space that allows people to enjoy cooking, relaxing and socialising.
This is diametrically opposed to a very traditional British garden, with a lawn and lots of flower bed borders. Part of a garden designers’ job is to challenge homeowners on how they can use their outdoor space to live life to the fullest and enjoy their leisure time wisely.
Perhaps this trend is a direct response to our work-heavy and digital focused lifestyle? After a day working at a computer, most people want to be able to feel the fresh air on their skin or unwind sitting around a firepit with their partner.
The outdoor living trend that is popular in Australia or parts of the USA, such as outdoor kitchens, built-in fire pit seating areas and multiple outdoor seating areas, have really begun to get popular here, despite our cooler climate.
Of course, our outdoor kitchens and living areas are equipped for the cooler weather with slimline heating panels and covered pergolas, for example. We can also install fireplaces, Alfa woodfired ovens and even televisions and speaker systems.
My contemporary gardens are designed to be lived in, using available space for seating, dining or cooking areas, surrounded by beautiful naturalistic planting. My ethos is to create modern outdoor spaces that enhance our clients’ experience, by enabling them to use their outdoor space all year round while maximising the garden’s ability to produce food and sustain wildlife.
Homeowners could think about how green roofing can increase growing surface areas. We have experimented with growing herbs and vegetables within these structures to great effect over the years. Green walls in particular play a huge role in increasing the surface area for growing a variety of food species, while protecting garden architecture from prevailing weather cycles.
Edible planting schemes which coexist with an outdoor kitchen are also hugely popular within my garden designs. Designed to sit alongside our outdoor living and cooking areas, I love creating edible planting areas, borders or containers filled with plants that can be snipped and added to a salad or thrown straight on a meal cooking on the woodfired oven. These work in a contemporary garden because, compared to a more formal vegetable patch, they are very low maintenance.
In terms of planting, my naturalistic and textural style is also really popular because of its low maintenance qualities. When designing a planting scheme, I don’t just think about colour and visual aspects, I consider the texture the plants and flowers create when placed together and how that will look.
Lastly, another really important part of any garden design is encouraging biodiversity and wildlife. This has also vastly grown in popularity since I became a garden designer as homeowners realise just how important it is to support wildlife and biodiversity within your own garden.
This could be as simple as installing hedgehog passes in fencing right through to planting hedgerows that support wildlife both from their fruit and from being a habitat.
