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Design led travel

Madeover – Before and After

Posted on 23.10.2019

Front Garden Makeover

Leading you indoors, a pathway to your front door, the first impression for your guests. A front garden can make a huge difference to your home.

Four years in the making, our front garden at the design house has been a bombsite for most of the time. The dumping ground for the build indoors, the skip wasteland, the pallet dropping-off point. We had so much work to do on the interior, we had not been ready to take on the path and planting that gives you your first taste of what awaits.

We are not gardeners, but we know a plant or two and we know what we love, so we applied some of our interior ideas to the makeover and got stuck in, with the beautifully re-instated victorian tiled path by Original Style as the main star.

Appropriate to the date of the architecture with a nod to what may be instore once you get inside, we wanted our front garden to make you smile, whilst being classic and low maintenance. We have chosen to use traditional victorian floor tiles as they are what would have been there originally and we took our cue from the tiles (and the pattern) that was still in the porch area when we moved in.

For us the house is very warm in tone, with its classic yellow london stock bricks so we have played that down by choosing a soft grey, white and black mix. It gives a bit of gravitas and makes a huge improvement from the uneven crazy paving that was there before.

Original Style offer a wide range of colours and sizes as individual tiles, so pretty much any pattern you can think of is possible.

We couldn't resist re-instating the victorian glazed tiles in the porchway. This Royal Blue is perfect for what is to come inside as you enter our hallway.

It takes a specialist to lay these type of tiles, but it is worth going to an expert. We added a rope border and limestone step to finish it off.

For the planting we chose low maintenance evergreens with white flowers for accents.

Round shaped shrubs and trees give it a touch of formality that works with the path and nods to our playful side too.

The fence isn't beautiful, but we planted evergreen flowering climber, Trachelospermum Jasminoides to fill out and cover it.

To finish it, we used steel edging strips and gravel. Simple and effective. Though we may become obsessed with raking it flat...

Spring Surprise! We also planted 250 bulbs in the borders for a floral show. Hard on the knees but it will be worth it!

Walking up the path makes us happy everytime now...and we aren't even joking. It is a gamechanger.

Get the look:

Victorian Floor tiles by Original Style UK, available here.

Original Style, Victorian Glazed Field Tiles in Royal Blue, available here.

And for those of you who would like to know about what plants we opted for, we have made a list for you.

Plant list:

Bay (the classic)

Ilex (looks like box balls, but resistant to blight)

Pittosporum (a new one on us, but so many beautiful varieties)

Camelia (existing tree with pink flowers)

Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’

Hydrangea ‘Vanilla Fraise’

Trachelospermum Jasminoides (evergreen climber with white scented flowers in summer)

Hellibores (otherwise known as winter rose)

White Aliums ‘Mont Blanc’ (bulbs)

Thalia Daffodils (white)

White Tulips ‘Spring Green’

Snakeshead Fritillary (not quite in the white theme, but we love them)

Special thanks to our lovely neighbour, garden designer, Emily Hillier, for her amazing planting tips and gardening knowledge, not to mention her help with some of the digging to get us started right. We couldn’t have done it without you and how lovely that our front garden has already helped us connect with a neighbour.

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