Category:
Garden Styles
When clients discuss plans for their gardens, they often picture lazy summer days, relaxing by the pool or entertaining friends and family while the outdoor kitchen is put through its paces. But in a city like Sydney, known for its mild climate, designing for the colder months of the year can pay big dividends.
The best architectural projects don’t draw a line between where the built environment ends and the garden begins. Instead, they consider the site as a whole, integrating the outdoor and indoor spaces into one, seamless experience. For multi level homes, rooftop gardens have become a key element in this approach, eliminating rooftop glare, connecting green sight lines across neighbourhoods and making the most of smaller footprints.
Our relationships with gardens are often more complex than we realise. Beyond the basics of providing outdoor entertaining spaces, a pool or room for the kids to play, they are places where we seek solace, daydream and make memories. They can evoke feelings of joy and exhilaration or melancholy and peace.
When people come to the garden design experience for the first time, it can be strange to think of gardens as having a style, or being in or out of fashion. But a quick glance over the past 20 or 30 years reveals a distinct shift, not just in how we want our outdoor spaces to function, but how we want them to look and feel.
Coastal gardens are high on the list of looks we love in our beach-loving country and it’s a style that suits us for more reasons than one. Loose and laidback, a seaside garden fits with our relaxed, beer-and-barbecues way of living, but it’s also ideally suited to surviving the challenges of any garden within blowing distance of a coastal breeze.
Designing a garden for the whole family includes considering the needs of its smallest members, with the ideal backyard luring the littlies away from their screens and into the great outdoors. Sounds like an impossible dream? Designing a garden for kids is actually simpler than you might expect.
Covid and the associated lockdowns and restrictions have made us all into reluctant (to one degree or another) homebodies. But if we’re looking for a silver lining to this whole crazy situation, one unexpected joy has been the opportunity to connect with our gardens. So how can you turn this time at home to your advantage? Here are our top tips.
Just as with fashion and interiors, there are garden trends, with certain plants or styles of landscapes falling in and out of vogue. From globally inspired gardens (everywhere from tuscany to bali) to the minimalist, ultra modern landscapes of the early noughties, we’ve seen plenty of garden trends come and go – and most of them we’re pretty happy to see the back of! There are some emerging garden trends now, however, that we’re very happy to embrace and are confident will stick around for a while.
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