Home Landscaping
BEAUTIFUL ON THE OUTSIDE
Does your landscape work beautifully, too?
We’ve been trusted with some big and stately renovation projects lately (partly due to the amazing media coverage we’ve achieved - thank you!) With big houses, comes big plots of land and sometimes several entry points. While this is a lovely problem to have, they don’t often function as well as they could, causing problems such as:
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Guests confused where to park
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Using the back door far more than the front
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Wasted hallways
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Gardens which are inaccessible from the house
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Not maximising hours of sunlight
Some large houses have several paths and driveways, due to centuries of front door and backdoor deliveries. Often the back door is most convenient and becomes most used by the family every day, and so looks like the best route for visitors to follow. This often means guests end up parking out the back, by the bins, getting tangled in your washing line and arriving in your messy boot room.
Studio Dean designs homes to be sanctuaries that feel like a hug as you walk through the door. This doesn’t work if you feel lost before you’ve even arrived, so we have become rather expert at planning the immediate landscape around homes to complete the perfect flow of the lives that are lived within them.
This Northumberland stately home encouraged guests to park at the front and enter through the front door which cut the garden up. We rectified it by reworking the driveway, creating family parking by the boot room and dedicated guest parking and a clear walkway to the house.
Due to larger estates being listed, we can’t do much to change the exterior doors and windows, but we can change the landscape around them. We work with owners to choose the best entrances to perform different functions and then redesign the landscape to direct people accordingly.
SUN MAPPING
I am obsessed with sun-mapping; considering the time of day we will use each space. A southwest facing garden is a must-have for long summer evenings. So, if there is a choice, we will always make sure this area is garden space, not driveway / bin store / shed space. This might mean using a different door as the ‘front door’ and turning the old entrance into garden access - all of this is exactly what we look at when we Spatially Plan your home and design the interior architecture.
INDOOR-OUTDOOR LIVING
Before renovation, the site had a beautiful house, and a beautiful garden, but the two weren’t functionally connected. Now we knew where the garden should be, we connected the indoor and outdoor spaces to help the flow between the spaces while working sympathetically with architecture of stately home.
We added partier terracing to the southwest which is accessed through a grand garden door (the old front door). We added a huge entertaining space with sunken seating and an outdoor kitchen. We moved the formal lounge to the south east of the house.
OUTSIDE-IN
We understand that just because things are where they are doesn’t mean they have to be. We think about day-to-day life for you and your guests and work around that. Sometimes the outside dictates the inside. And sometimes the interior architecture doesn’t work without landscaping the outside first.
Once we had figured out the outdoor flow to the house, we could then start planning the interior architecture. Now we knew where the front entrance was, we created a stunning lobby with a cloakroom and loo and added another staircase to completely change the flow of the indoors and make all the rooms far more accessible and ensure they all got used. The lobby flows through to a library space, with sightlines right through the house. This would have been pointless if we hadn’t worked through the outside landscaping and found the front door first.
To speak to Cathy Dean further on Landscaping, Interior Architecture, or anything else, please get in touch.
