PROJECT

Hampshire Garden, United Kingdom

LANDSCAPE DESIGNERS

Charlotte Rowe Garden Design

CLAY PAVERS

SeptimA Olive

PROCESSING

Sika jointing compound

Photos: © Daniela D'Amato & Charlotte Rowe

This is an English country garden in a rural area of outstanding natural beauty. The clients had bought the farmhouse with a garden of around one hectare and wanted to keep the natural feel of the house and surrounding landscape with its views across fields and woods so were only undertaking minimal works to the fabric of the house. However, the existing garden did not meet their needs and, having had a garden designed by Charlotte Rowe before, they wanted the studio to help bring some of her design guidance to the garden and make it in more in keeping with their lifestyle.

This included the addition of an outdoor swimming pool to the rear of the house and the reconfiguration of all the outdoor terraces with the complication that the garden is steeply sloping. Charlotte Rowe decided to place the pool outside the main living room of the house as it was the perfect location, running East to West but this meant that the pool would need to be set into a sloping area of the garden close to the property boundary which was tricky both in design and construction terms as one side of the pool edge would need to be higher than the other.

At the same time, it was decided to create a series of terraces between the house and pool, around the pool and beyond using a combination of the more traditional sawn York stone paving and Vande Moortel SeptimA Olive clay pavers with some gravel areas for planting within them. The detailing and combination of all these natural materials was crucial for the design of the whole garden and the clay pavers were a key element as they were used for most of the edging of the pool, the high right hand side wall of the pool cut into the slope and the wide generous steps down into the pool.

Charlotte Rowe: “We wanted the hard landscaping for the terrace and around the pool to have more texture than if we had simply used sandstone paving and we feel that this has been achieved by using the SeptimA Olive clay pavers.
The Olive clay paver also complements and contrasts beautifully with the York stone paving and loose gravel used for the other hard standing areas. It is particularly effective for the walls of and steps down to the swimming pool which has been built into a steep slope in the garden, and the clay pavers have been used for the higher wall on one side to great effect.

Sika jointing compound was used for the pointing between the pavers as sand would not have been practicable due to it being used for both the terrace and the interior sides and steps of the pool. However, this compound is permeable which was important. We also found that the clay pavers dried very quickly after rainfall.
The planting around the whole garden was designed to be drought tolerant and low maintenance – a large amount of prairie style grass planting was used to achieve this.”