The planting, as floral as it is, isn’t so ‘loud’ as to upstage the view.
The site for the garden slopes in two directions – mostly away from the house, but there’s also a sideways slope – so it was necessary to create some internal retaining walls, and in one major case, the owners decided to use bricks recycled from a previous iteration of the garden.
Other low walls adjacent to paving were clad with stone matching the pavers, a beautiful split face (rather than sawn) natural stone that’s sheer hell to lay, being in total random rectangles that make for a giant jigsaw puzzle. It also varies in thickness, so that a level is only achieved by adjusting the depth of mortar beneath each piece. But the result, when done well, is very lovely indeed.
The owners love the planting designs of Dutch designer Piet Oudolf and discussed this with Paul Bangay, who has himself been influenced by Oudolf’s naturalistic style of perennial planting. So the main lawn is framed with deep borders filled with a repetitive palette of these colourful and long-flowering plants along with some box balls as permanent visual anchors. The collective effect is fabulous and looks so complex that it’s hard to believe Paul only used nine different plant species to achieve it.
Being very fire-conscious, the owners were keen to keep the lawn surrounding the house permanently green. This also justified the construction of a generous-sized pool that could serve as an emergency water supply. And while the pool is large, the paving around it is proportionally so. Even in the early days of Paul’s nearly 40-year career, he recognised the benefits, and in many cases the necessity, of ‘over-scaling’ – making or providing features that really pushed the boundaries or expectations of size. Certainly in this case, anything smaller than this area of paving, around an already large pool, would have looked trivial against the view.
The lawn is also large but provides a fabulous and perfectly scaled ‘plinth’ on which the view comfortably sits. The planting, as floral as it is, isn’t so ‘loud’ as to upstage the view. The wings of planting form a simple, open-centred bowl that lets the view speak without interruption.