Garden ideas from the best landscape designers on our Directory

A garden isn’t just space outside. It’s an opportunity: a place that can inspire and delight, a chance to observe the seasons, grow some vegetables, take an alfresco lunchtime or just sit peacefully with the sound of birds and the ripple of the wind. Of course, to gain all that you’re going to have to put some thought into it, just like if you were designing a room inside. With that in mind, we’re turning to the best landscape designers operating in Britain today, as picked from our Directory, for some outdoor inspiration. 

Alexandra Noble Design

London-based Alexandra Noble trained as an architect before moving into landscape design, a pedigree that comes through in her work, which has transformed gardens from Hampstead to Ealing into thoughtful arrangements of space, colour and texture. And, like an architect, Noble can get minimal too: her courtyard garden in west London is a single cherry tree artfully positioned next to a cantilevered glass box that protrudes from the house – très zen. 

Angus Thompson Design

An Angus Thompson garden is ‘quietly contemporary’, according to the studio, a phrase we rather like in relation to landscaping. Nature’s timeless beauty is one you shouldn’t attempt to bend into anything too zeitgeisty. Ditch the ‘abstract’ planting arrangements and forget about razor-sharp borders, and opt instead for something that celebrates the eternal attraction of plants (albeit in an ordered, manageable way). 

 

Take the studio’s intervention at a Victorian townhouse in north Oxford, where the demands of a family garden – a family space, access to a work studio, entertaining, the need for planting – were met in a smart-looking composition where the plainness of York stone paving and lawn is offset by free patches of ferns, cow parsley and summer flowers. 

Barbara Samitier Gardens 

Barbara Samitier doesn’t only believe gardens should look good, they should feel special, and reflect the needs, sensibilities and interests of their owners. Perhaps that explains the names she gives to her projects, like ‘A garden for an architect’, ‘About two Japanese Acers’, ‘A garden for Coco’ (Coco being the client’s spaniel, of course).

 

For the epicureans among you, look to Samitier’s garden for a chef, which catered to the owners love of entertaining and cooking with a small kitchen garden producing vegetables and herbs, an outdoor kitchen equipped with a Big Green Egg barbecue and a lively patio paved with encaustic tiles, the ideal setting for a morning coffee, long summer lunch or late-night grill session.

GRDN

Urban gardens, specifically in London postcodes, are the remit of this practice, which install textured planting, hard landscaping and personalised elements into small-space city plots. If you’re a little short on space, fear not, you can still create something impactful, as projects like the studio’s overhaul of a garden in south-east London prove, where a harmonious, restful atmosphere was achieved by a continuation of interior spaces with the same parquet wooden flooring outside as the kitchen, and low-maintenance gravel and stone planks, reminiscent of a Japanese rock garden.

Peter Williams Studio 

This nascent studio first came to our attention when we sold Noble Barn, a flamboyant Victorian cowshed reimagined for contemporary living by McLaren.Excell architects. The garden design is as expressive as the Arts and Crafts style barn, with the one and a half acres divided into four separate gardens: an entrance space where a large Sycamore grows around old machinery; a formal garden with a dining terrace; an expansive lawn with a hedged border and a wooded parkland. The lesson here is, if you have the space, make use of it, creating different moments and opportunities with planting, paving and open stretches. 

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