Contemporary Garden Design in East Sheen

The clients had completed a contemporary rear extension to their Edwardian home in East Sheen — a wide steel-and-glass opening onto a south-facing garden. The existing garden, however, still belonged to a previous era: crazy paving, a curved lawn and overgrown conifers along the boundary.

They wanted a garden that read as a continuation of the new architecture: clean, considered, low-fuss, with a strong evening atmosphere and a planting scheme that gave structure all year round.

We designed a strongly linear scheme that picks up the geometry of the rear elevation. A full-width porcelain terrace runs the breadth of the extension. Beyond it, a single broad path of large-format paving slices through a generous lawn to a destination corner with a cedar bench and a multi-stem birch.

Vertical cedar screens replace the old conifers and conceal the side return. A simple architectural planting palette — yew domes, prairie grasses, white-flowering perennials — gives the garden structure in winter and movement in summer.

The build ran over eleven weeks. We cleared the existing garden in week one and removed the mature conifers, including stump grinding along the side and rear boundaries.

Groundworks followed: a properly engineered sub-base for the terrace and the central path, a perimeter drainage run, and first-fix lighting cable. The cedar screens were set on concealed galvanised steel posts cast into concrete pad foundations.

Soft landscaping was the final phase: 300mm of imported topsoil to the borders, the multi-stem birch craned in from the side return, and the planting laid out on a measured grid before going in over three days.