Welcome to our Blog. Inspiration, updates and industry trends from the team at Landscaping Solutions.
What’s the secret to a successful build when the landscaping involved clearly offers challenges?
Flexibility and communication.
Without these, a garden build becomes confused, mistakes are made and jobs have to be redone.
With them, you can win a prestigious BALI award.
Client, Quentin Zentner with the BALI award at the ceremony earlier this month.
We won’t pretend that our award-winning garden in Barnet, North London, was easy. From planning to completion has taken over four years, as work was postponed more than once to allow for the client’s family circumstances. On top of this, a major refurbishment of the house overlapped with the garden build, which meant that we were sharing the site—and the storage space in front of the house—with builders working on the interior. Work schedules needed rejigging to allow for the late arrival of the gas supply to the barbecue. And, as you can imagine over a lengthy build, the client honed their requirements further, resulting in the installation of a Rensen canopy which needed an electrical run laid down and a relocation of pleached trees that had already been planted.
The lower part of the garden offers different areas for seating.
Designer Jilayne Rickards had her work cut out from the beginning, with a triangular-shaped back garden that tapered from 7 metres width at the back of the house to 4.5 metres at the bottom. “The garden isn’t big, and the clients wanted several areas—different “rooms” with entertaining spaces,” she explains. “They’re very much party people. They had teenage daughters at the time, and they like to have family around and dance.”
Lighting is an important element in this party-orientated garden. “I wanted to make it intimate,” says Jilayne, “with the water feature, screens and sculpture lit and making a focal point of trees and main features.”
This awkward-shaped plot also offered a 2-metre drop from front to back, restricted access the width of a wheelbarrow, and heavy clay which, as winter progressed, became totally waterlogged. “You couldn’t move,” says Jilayne, “for getting that great big lump of clay around your foot that weighs a ton.” This meant, not just waiting out the worst and shifting schedules as we worked around the weather and soil conditions, but an enormous amount of soil amelioration in the form of bucket-on-shoulder shifting of horticultural grit and manure for border preparation.
Our BALI award-winning garden, designed by Jilayne Rickards, with trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants supplied by Europlants.
In circumstances like these, you have to be flexible, ready to reconsider your options, and understand exactly what jobs can be shifted around each other and which can’t. You also have to communicate with all parties involved, every day if necessary. This job clocked up hundreds of emails and hundreds of phone calls, keeping the right people informed, checking up on details, pinning down timings.
Sharing a small site with other contractors who are working to their own agenda is often one of the challenges of high-end builds, as refurbishments indoor and out tend to take place at the same time. Our team on site was headed by James. “He’s one of the best foremen I’ve ever worked with,” says Jilayne. “The contractor was doing the lighting with the client in charge, so we didn’t always know what was happening, and the contractor didn’t turn up or finish when they said they would.
“It was quite troublesome,” she adds, with a degree of understatement. “James, the foreman was just phenomenal—one of the best foremen I’ve ever worked with. He offered lots of solutions along the way and didn’t lose his cool.”
The front garden, designed to make the most of sunlit grasses supplied by Knoll Gardens.
The results speak for themselves.
Out front, the clients wanted a pretty, welcoming garden with grasses lit by sunlight and space for cars. The sunny, dry gravel garden includes a dry-stone wall using quartzite paddlestones and Irish barley quartz gravel supplied by CED. There’s also a Sureset resin-bound drive which wasn’t on our schedule but which we slipped into our schedule to install after another contractor let them down.
The front and back garden are very different spaces, so Jilayne made the connection between the two with materials and design details. The client was keen to use Cor-Ten steel and include Arabic patterns. In the back garden Jilayne combined the two with laser-cut screens.
Cor-Ten steel, stipulated by the client, makes a statement front and back.
As these were a bespoke design, there was no tried and tested way of mounting them, so we devised bespoke fixings, minimising the chance of corrosion from contact with the soil by constructing a stand that was then fixed to a feature and bolted into concrete. Cor-Ten steel continued into the front garden in the lighting posts, while the Arabic pattern was repeated in the steel drain cover—a detail which particularly delighted the client.
Trendy Black Porcelain paving, sawn sandstone coping and resin-bound gravel create a perfect finish with the bespoke gully cover.
Trendy Black Porcelain from London Stone was used as paving throughout, linking front and back, and we created a modern, minimalist wall cladding with the same material for the built-in seats around the Fire Magic gas barbecue, complementing the choice of granite for the worktop and bespoke water feature.
The side passage maintains continuity between front and back gardens with the use of steel, Trendy Black Porcelain paving and gravel leading into the rear space.
The awkward shape of the plot was disguised with a diagonal design, creating two areas below the patio, with intimate seating between panels, allowing party guests to enjoy a quiet chat, and ending on a lawned area, completely hidden from neighbours, ideal for deckchairs on a Sunday morning, reading the papers.
The finish is always important, but it can make a particular impact where materials are repeated to create cohesion. A jarring defect in one area will then cast a shadow over all the work in that material.
The Cor-Ten steel screens and sculpture are highlighted at night.
“The finish was exquisite, because that’s how Landscaping Solutions work,” said Jilayne. “I went round looking and I wanted to find something, but I couldn’t fault anything. Everything was finished perfectly.”
We’ve loved working with Jilayne so we’re delighted that she feels the same about us. While the project proved a long, arduous journey with plenty of challenges along the way, its BALI award proves all the hard work worthwhile and shows what can be done when everyone on a project is fully engaged, communicating and aiming at the same result.
Some of the Landscaping Solutions team who worked on the project: (from left) Ben West (at back) Jack Comer, Chris Makepeace, Sam Gilbert, Tom Underwood, Morris Manole.
“I’d work with Ben again in a heartbeat,” says Jilayne. “It’s just great working with people who have such high standards.”
If you’d like to discuss a garden design project and what we at Landscaping Solutions can do for you, please give us a ring on 0208 2412402 or email us at info@landscapingsolutionsltd.co.uk