From the Drawing Board: Concept design and sketches for client in West Sussex

I have recently been working with a client in West Sussex who had their garden designed and built some 20 years ago.  It’s an amazing location, tucked away in the country and the garden is fully mature now and really quite wonderful.   So why, I ask you say, have I been asked to come in and have a look?

Well, their children have grown up and almost left home so rather than moving house, they decided to reconfigure their existing house so that it better suits their needs.  The addition of a new garden room adjoining the house will also impact the garden in that area and they would really like to create a different sort of space there, somewhere informal and more intimate than the rest of the garden. 

There are other areas around the house which need revising too as the various sitting areas adjoining the house are currently part of the through route around the house.  This means that my clients never feel quite comfortable when they’re sitting there and it is really important that we make these areas separate from the main access routes.

Because of the complexities of the site, and as the revisions to the design need to be absolutely right for new configuration of the house, I built in an additional meeting to the design process.  My client is an architect and they will be implementing the design themselves so I will only be producing a concept design for them.  We had a meeting a week or so ago to discuss the first draft of the concept design.  This was a really productive meeting as we were able to walk round the garden at the same time as making some amendments to the plan.  The drawing above is the 2nd draft which I have sent to my client ahead of our next meeting which is scheduled for next week.

The intention is to start work as soon as possible.  The soil there is heavy clay so ideally they want to carry out the ground works before it gets too wet to bring in the machinery but the main construction will take place over the winter months in time for planting in the Spring.