IT CAN be difficult to imagine a small back yard ever resembling anything like a garden but this week’s garden style is perfect for such spaces.
The modern minimalist garden style has a primary focus on outdoor living. A style most popular in urban gardens where space is at a premium, it provides the opportunity to extend the house into the garden. You can quite literally create outdoor rooms to suit any number of activities – dining and relaxing among the favourites.
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outdoor space: A style most popular in urban gardens, the modern minimalist garden style has a primary focus on outdoor living.
These garden rooms are most successful when designed and constructed to accommodate specific furniture for the desired use and to link visually with the overall design.
For a lounge area a good solution would be to plan a spacious patio for an outdoor sofa and coffee table set. The area would gain a sense of privacy and cosiness by enveloping with tall luscious planting. A fireplace positioned opposite the seating can also add not only warmth but an architectural focal point, anything from a small chimnea or copper fire bowl to a custom stone built fully functional fireplace.
If you are really limited on space then incorporated benches built in to the hard landscaping can be a great alternative. A garden with raised planting beds are a good idea as they are easy maintenance and cantilevered benches can easily be incorporated into them giving a really contemporary look. Easy maintenance planting goes hand-in-hand with this style of garden commonly featuring tiered evergreen hedging with slow growing varieties like box and yew and sometimes pleached “hedges in the air” that only require a trim a couple of times a year. Minimalist planting schemes work best if kept as simple as possible, block planting whole borders in just one species can make a really strong statement especially if combined with bold architectural plants strategically placed as focal points.
With the minimalist style a simple and uncluttered approach to every aspect of the design needs to be taken but the careful use of materials is particularly important to get the right effect. If you incorporate raised beds into your garden then they could be built using a number of materials and techniques such as bricks, railway sleepers and rendered block walls. Light coloured rendered walls produce a clean and simple look which works beautifully when combined with a modern paving like black limestone for contrast. Tall boundary walls can be made into stunning focal points by treating them like a canvas and adding other materials to create interesting effects.
Something as simple as horizontal wooden slats, fixed between the supporting pillars of a wall can produce a surprisingly modern and expensive look. Garden designers often take inspiration from the client’s use of interior design with the materials like a hardwood deck placed just outside the patio doors which gives the impression that the wooden floor in the room continues outdoors.
There are many ways that designers integrate water within modern minimalist gardens as a method of softening the hard-lines. Re-circulating water feature pools are very popular and relatively easy to install – specifically wall mounted water blades (which are ideal for this style) producing a smooth sheet waterfall effect. Large pools of still water can also act like a giant mirror reflecting the sky and giving a calming and contemplative feel to the onlooker.
If you have any questions e-mail me at: info@gardnerdesigns.co.uk
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