Sarah & Martin's
Outdoor Living

Outdoor Living Project

Dates:- June 20th - July 10th

Client Brief

The clients approached me to create a garden that offered a safe and useable space for them, their kids and 2 dogs to enjoy. I was faced with a garden that sloped from one side to the other by five feet. There was no drainage, nowhere to sit out, a lawn in disrepair and really didn't inspire to be used by anyone

What I came up with for them was to create a nice sitting area first of all, and since most people sit out of an evening we picked the sunniest corner of the garden. Unfortuneatly this area was sloping severely, so we brought in the mini-digger and excavated 25 tons of very poor sub-strate. We then retsauned the area with 30 wooden sleepers which would retain the neighbours garden and allow us to plant bamboo to act as screening.

image of outdoor area created from sleepers design by Pairi-dae-za designs.

We levelled the area with 300mm of Type 1 aggregate and then layed on a concrete screeded bed 25m squared of beautiful buff sandstone paving, surrounded by plum coloured slate.

Next we excavated the entire garden of the old lawn and 100 mm of sub-soil and put in 50 linear metre of drainage coil and clean 20mm stone, 15 tons of sandy / loam soil was brought in and levelled ready for new lawn turf to be put down.

The client had stated that they had bought atrampoline, so we decided to connect another sleeper wall to the patio corner and run it right round the perimeter of the garden and create a corner play area where the trampoline would sit, however, with the view that the kids will get older we decided to put in a proper Type 1 aggregate base before the play bark was put in so that in the future this area could have a summer house put on it with a small patio area and planting.

image of grey Indian sandstone with gravel.

The final stage was to link the back door of the house to the front, and we did this by creating a smaller patio at the back door framed by black mono-block, stepping stones, would take you across the lawn to the main patio area, and a solid sandstone paving path, framed again with black mono-block would take you all the way around the house to the front gate, nicely finished with decorative gravel.