Garden Makeover in Kingston upon Thames

The brief

The garden worked on paper but not in practice. The usable space was in the wrong place, the seating caught shade while the sunniest stretch was given to a struggling strip of lawn, the surfaces were tired, and the planting had thinned to the point of not earning its keep. The owners had lived with it long enough to know exactly what was wrong, which made the brief unusually clear: not a tidy-up, but a proper rethink. A garden arranged around how they actually live, where they sit, when they're out there, what they can realistically maintain, finished to a standard that lasts.

How we approached it

When owners can already articulate what's wrong, the design job is to translate frustrations into structure. Seating in the shade means the layout ignores the sun, so the first step was mapping where the light actually falls through the day and rebuilding the plan around it: the seating moved to where the owners would genuinely use it, the lawn resized to the space that suits grass, and the borders positioned to frame both rather than fill leftover gaps.

The second principle was to fix the ground before dressing it. Tired gardens usually have tired ground, compacted, poorly drained, hungry, and new surfaces laid straight over those problems inherit them. Levels were corrected and drainage and soil dealt with before any of the visible work began, so the finished garden performs as well as it photographs. It's slower and less exciting than the transformation shots, and it's also why the transformation holds.

What we did

• ✓Mapped the garden's light through the day and redesigned the layout around how the owners actually use the space
• ✓Cleared the tired elements while retaining the features and planting worth keeping
• ✓Corrected the levels and dealt with drainage and soil before any new surfaces went in
• ✓Renewed the hard landscaping, relocating the seating area to where the sun actually falls
• ✓Refreshed the boundaries to give the garden a clean, consistent frame
• ✓Rebuilt the borders with structural planting for year-round shape and seasonal interest
• ✓Handed over a clean site with every load of waste removed

The result

The same plot, working completely differently: seating where the evening sun is, a lawn that's the right size to keep well rather than the biggest size possible, and planting that gives the garden shape in January as well as June. The frustrations that defined the old garden, the shady bench, the struggling grass, the beds that gave nothing back, were each addressed at the design stage rather than patched afterwards. It's the difference between a garden you have and a garden you use, which was precisely the brief.