At a creekside garden in West London, Claire Mee has jettisoned lawn, borders and dull rectangular design in favour of colourful planting pockets around a serpentine path and award-winning hard landscaping
WORDS CLARE FOGGETT PHOTOGRAPHS MMGI/BENNET SMITH
I don’t understand this obsession with lawns!” maintains garden designer Claire Mee, who describes her clients at this Richmond garden as ‘the dream’ because they were willing to forego a traditional lawn in their brief for their new plot. “A lot of clients insist on them, but it can be so boring when you come out of the house and all you see is lawn.” For their part, the owners were keen to enliven the plain patch of grass they’d inherited at the back of their new house. “We’ve got a lot of parks around here, so even though our girls are sporty, we didn’t feel we needed a big lawn with football nets,” they explain.
“There was literally nothing in the garden,” recalls Claire of her first visit, after the owners’ interior designer had recommended her to them. “A horrible terrace with horrible steps down, a large lawn and two really narrow beds down each side with overgrown shrubbery.”
But the site was full of potential, especially since it slopes down to a creek off the Thames, where the family moor their boat and where swans glide by and geese land. Claire’s design for the new garden came about in two phases. A first draft included a design for an undulating wave-like fence at the bottom of the garden that addressed the owners’ priority: closing off access to the creek to make the garden safe for their daughters who were quite young at the time. “Claire was extremely patient with us. She designed the beautiful fence which we had for two years, and then we were ready to get rid of the fence and pull the trigger on the garden project,” the owners explain. A new boathouse was being built beside the creek, so alongside its architects, Claire altered her first design for the garden to work within its new parameters. “It’s even better than we anticipated,” the owners enthuse.
Perhaps the garden’s most striking feature of all is the serpentine path that meanders its way from a smart, new suntrap of a terrace situated immediately outside the back of the house to the beautifully built new boathouse and lower seating and landing area next to the creek – although Claire thoughtfully added stepping-stone shortcuts
