The  client had been renting her house out while working abroad. Her front garden had been fairly utilitarian to minimise the work any tenants needed to do, a concrete path to the front door and gravel in between. An overgrown hedge at the front that while providing much needed shelter had encroached into the garden making an already narrow space even narrower. Once home she started renovating the house to create a cosy space to live in which lead to the front garden becoming a dumping ground as the house was extended and new windows put in.

The front garden gets the evening sun so a seating area was created. Surrounded by planting and without everyone seeing you from the road.

The path was moved from against the house to the middle of the garden, providing borders either side, including planting outside the bedroom windows. Nicer view when you wake up in the morning and come home. Felt like there was more privacy from passing traffic.

The existing deciduous hedge which had taken over half of the garden was replaced with an evergreen hedge for year round privacy and shelter. It is also maintained regularly now to stop it from encroaching on the other planting and also to stop it from making the garden feel narrower than it already is.

Path divided the space into four borders while allowing you to choose whether to go to the front door, to the seating area or stop at look at a feature planter (where the pedestrian gate and path used to be, although there was hedge behind it).

Keeping some form of hedge or shelter at the front was important to protect the planting. The other problem was that it is a bungalow with the bedrooms at the front of the house. Friends didn’t want to come and stay, as they didn’t feel they had much privacy. Whilst there was a hedge at the front of the house, the guest bedroom was between the front path up to the door and the drive. So anyone walking past and glancing up the path or drive would be able to see once the curtains were opened. The hedge at the front was also deciduous so didn’t offer much protection from autumn through the early spring.