Play & Display: A multi-layered garden balances playfulness and beauty through innovative design.

Good design can be playful as well as beautiful and a sense of fun permeates this small but multi-layered Clapham garden, with its basement slide, bespoke playhouse and a focus on dense planting and views.

Design

The garden’s design is both playful and aesthetic, featuring unique elements such as a basement slide and a bespoke playhouse, while also focusing on rich, layered planting and strategic views. Our design team aimed to reflect the creative and artistic personalities of the homeowners, while ensuring the space was family-friendly.

When our clients moved into their Victorian house in Clapham Old Town with their two young daughters, they appointed our team to design and build the garden, having had success with us in their previous home.

Preparation and Build

Upon evaluating the existing garden, it was clear that the space lacked the elements our client valued from her childhood experiences in gardening, influenced by her mother, a horticulturist. The original garden featured harsh geometric designs with two dark concrete slabs centrally located and an artificial grass play area hidden behind a high hedge, resulting in minimal planting primarily consisting of grasses and clipped yew cubes.

Our aim was to work with the garden’s existing layout to minimise waste and costs. Our design team creatively repurposed areas to enhance usability and visual appeal. The lower-ground-floor dining area, previously characterised by brick and concrete, has been transformed into an elegant outdoor kitchen, complete with an outdoor grill, barbecue, and herb planters. This design decision takes advantage of the large dining table in the kitchen, which opens directly onto the outdoor kitchen, acknowledging that outdoor dining is less frequent in England.

In the upper-ground-floor area, our build team crushed and compacted the concrete slabs from the previous inbuilt kitchen unit to create the sub-base for a new seating area. This sustainable strategy avoided the need to dispose of materials offsite while creating a new, functional element in the garden.

Planting

Planting was at the forefront of the design concept, given the clients background and her vision for a garden that embodies texture, flow, and a natural yet polished aesthetic. The polished concrete surfaces retained in the lower level have been softened with contemporary iroko cladding and a raised bed filled with shade-loving plants, including ferns, astrantia, and Pittosporum ‘Tom Thumb’.

Initially skeptical about the modern plate-glass balustrades, Quincy has come to appreciate their transparency, which allows unobstructed views of the garden and seasonal changes in the planting. The integration of diverse plant life and thoughtful hardscape creates a captivating environment that is both inviting and functional.