Family Garden Transformation in Richmond Hill

The clients — a family of four with two young children and a dog — had recently extended their Victorian villa on Richmond Hill. The original garden had been left untouched during the build: a worn lawn, a fractured concrete path and a series of mismatched timber edges.

They wanted somewhere their children could play safely, a generous terrace that opened cleanly from the new kitchen, and a planting scheme that didn't ask for constant attention but still felt considered from the principal rooms of the house.

We began with a measured survey of the garden and the rear elevation, then designed a simple, well-proportioned layout: a full-width porcelain terrace level with the new kitchen threshold, a generous rectangle of lawn beyond, and deep planting borders to soften the boundaries.

Sightlines from the kitchen and family room guided the geometry. A pair of multi-stem amelanchiers were placed to frame the view from the kitchen island, and a low corten edge separates lawn from border without breaking the line of sight.

The build ran over nine weeks. We stripped the existing garden back to subsoil, installed a perimeter drainage run tied into a new soakaway, and laid an engineered sub-base across the terrace area.

The porcelain was laid on a full mortar bed by our in-house masons, with hand-cut margins around the existing boundary walls. The cedar planter was built on site by our carpenter and finished with a low-VOC oil.

Soft landscaping followed the hard works: 250mm of imported topsoil to the borders, the specimen amelanchiers craned into position from the side return, and a structural planting palette of evergreen shrubs and ornamental grasses underplanted with seasonal perennials.