Principal Award Winner
Domestic Garden Construction – Soft Landscaping
Designer: Mark Draper
PHOTO GALLERIES
Principal Award Winners 2025
The clients asked us to soften and uplift the feel of their garden. Over recent years they had refurbished and extended the original farmhouse, adding retaining walls to create level areas around the sloping site and laying reclaimed and sandstone paving on three sides of the property.
The aim was to produce a predominately soft landscape scheme that works with and complements the property and the existing hard landscaping. The new planting scheme was to have a country garden feel, soft and textural, with some all-year-round structure incorporated.
The rear terrace area to be softened, with new borders added, linking with the existing areas, providing a cohesive look to the rear garden area.
The front of the house was heavily paved, which provided a lot of unused seating and an overall ‘heavy’ look to the area. The new scheme therefore lifted large sections, leaving a more structured and designed look to the remaining paving layout, with new border areas created in place of the lifted paving.
A new path (using lifted paving) was introduced to the side of the house to link the front and rear paved areas. Along with a new seating area to the other side of the house, which made use of the evening sun, a path was included here to provide access to the stables (it’s naturally a very wet site, so providing a hard surface around the property was essential).
In order to link the old and new, the design includes sett panel details which help to create movement and sight lines through the garden. Linking the upper paddock to the garden was needed too, and a new set of steps was incorporated through the existing retaining wall to provide this link. Mown paths and wildflower meadow have been included in this area, along with a sitting area at the top to take advantage of the views (further tree planting to be undertaken here in autumn ’25).
With some simple changes, the scheme has really transformed the look and feel of the property. Having only been planted at the end of April/early May, it’s already feeling a lot softer.
The clients are delighted with both the design and the way the team delivered the works.
The Completed Garden
During construction
Before we started
