Egerton Crescent in Knightsbridge is a particularly beautiful crescent of large, Georgian houses, each set well back from the road, and each having a large garden in the front, so I was honoured to be asked to do the garden design for both the front garden and the back garden for one of these houses.  As the house is listed and in a conservation area, the design needed to echo the formality of the house, whilst it still needed to be able to appeal to the more contemporary tastes of the client.  When designing a garden of any house in a conservation area, you need to pay tribute to the history of the house and retain the character of the area.  This is especially important to the front of a house in a street like Egerton Crescent, or you will probably suffer the consequences from the planners!

It goes without saying that one’s client plays the most important role in any design, and my clients were looking for elegance, simplicity and a feeling of openness and space.  The interiors of the house were being designed with a taste of Parisian chic with some bold, more contemporary features serving to highlight the designs.  

For the front garden you can see I interpreted my client’s wish for simplicity and openness, whilst still paying heed to the classical style of block parterres that echo the history of the Georgian era.  For the back garden however, I was able to have more freedom to create a slightly more contemporary design, drawing inspiration from different focal points seen at past Chelsea Flower Show gardens, as well as from design ideas from my own portfolio that the client had seen and liked.  To the back of the garden there is a free standing, stone clad wall to hide the external air conditioning units, and this stone cladding is echoed in another stone clad, free standing wall in the main garden area, which has a suspended stone bench lit from underneath.  The hard landscaping materials are stone, gravel and timber, and there is a simple but effective lighting plan that transforms the garden in the evenings