A HOLIDAY AT HOME

4 JACUZZI 5 SUNBEDS

SUMMER HOUSE

L OG ST ORE LAWN

FACT FILE

THE DETAILS Caroline and Tim Norris live here with their children, Maya, Stanley, Ted and Ada. They have a large 30x15m (98.4x49.2ft) plot belonging to a 1950s five-bedroom house in Hampton, Middlesex. THE CHALLENGE The couple were complete garden novices so they needed to spend time researching exactly how best to use their large rectangular plot.

THE PLAN

Caroline says, ‘We wanted to connect the house to the garden and make it a space we could use all year round. We still wanted it to look lovely, but also be a sociable space for entertaining

BEDS friends and family, and we needed to have storage too.’

1 CORNER DINING AREA PATIO

2 HANGING CHAIR 3 OUTDOOR KITCHEN After extending and renovating their home, which took around nine months, Caroline and Tim Norris decided to take a break for a couple of years before turning their attention to the garden. ‘We are both complete garden novices, so we really needed to think about what we wanted and do lots of research,’ says Caroline.

The garden was a good size, stocked with mature shrubs and trees, but the couple rarely ventured past the patio seating area, which meant all that space was going to waste. ‘We went to the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival as a starting point,’ says Caroline, ‘then we used Pinterest to find images to illustrate a wish list of what we had in mind for the garden.

‘Luckily, we knew a landscape gardener, Simon Fraser, and trusted him to do a good job. Initially, we paid him a £500 ($695) design fee to plot out everything on our wish list. We tried not to be too prescriptive, so he had the freedom to come up with creative solutions and ideas that we hadn’t thought of.’

Once the plans were agreed, the garden was cleared and the summerhouse was built, taking five days, including one to lay the foundations. Simon did the rest, including the raised beds, outdoor kitchen, shed, wood store and planting. ‘We wanted low-maintenance plants, especially various grasses, to create the Mediterranean look I had in mind,’ says Caroline.

Before the redesign

The couple never really ventured past the patio