Seamless: tricks for creating the perfect year-round garden, from clever colour schemes to fake living walls

Echo interior colour schemes and furniture shapes for a seamless transition from inside to outside.
MMGI / Marianne Majerus
Alex Mitchell25 June 2018

Tiny spaces can work well with big, bold ideas — and this courtyard garden in Richmond has plenty to steal. Measuring just 26ft by 13ft, it was originally a dark, rather oppressive space with a lawn struggling in the shade of a high boundary wall.

From these inauspicious beginnings, award-winning designer Matt Keightley has created a playful, geometric masterpiece that seamlessly blends the interior of the house to the exterior space.

“It’s odd where you get your inspiration from,” says Keightley. “You always try to repeat colours from inside in the garden but here we went one step further, not just in picking up the greys from the kitchen but the geometry of the cupboards and furniture inside the house including a large green sofa. The minute you open the front door you see all the way through into the garden so it all had to link together.”

As with so many London houses these days, a large expanse of glazing at the back of the house opens completely, making it essential that the transition from inside to outside felt natural.

The growing popularity of low-profile window frames and large panes of glass means gardens these days need “to be exciting to look at and move through”. Especially since in London you’ll be inside looking out for most of the year. “It’s crucial to use the same colour palette for when the doors are opened,” says Keightley.

Rectangles referencing the interior cupboards are everywhere in this garden, from the evergreen topiary yews that remind you of a chessboard to a solid granite “bridge” leading to an anodised aluminium corner bench, and panels of granite that appear to float on the large living wall down one side.

There are no curves outside because inside is all straight lines. The green and grey colour scheme in the kitchen and living area has inspired the planting palette.

Tiny spaces can work well with big, bold ideas
MMGI / Marianne Majerus

No flowers, just evergreens and hornbeam trees. “If you were to look at a planting schedule you’d laugh, it’s so simple,” he says. “You’d have trees, carpinus [hornbeam], shrubs, taxus [yew] and herbaceous, asplenium scolopendrium [hart’s tongue fern].”

And yet there is nothing simplistic about the way Keightley has put the plants and space together, with the precision finish that makes him such an exciting contemporary designer. “If you have one level with a bench it takes two seconds to see a space this small, but if you create dramatic level changes your eye gradually moves around,” he explains. So three large multistem hornbeam trees draw your eye upwards.

At eye level, artworks of silver birch trunks by Mary Bourne playfully reference the real trees planted in front of them. On the ground, areas of granite chippings have been tamped down by six inches to make them a different level from the granite bridge “to create intrigue and interest”.

A line of hart’s tongue ferns underplanting the aluminium bench makes another strong statement. And the back boundary of horizontal softwood cladding is stained dark so it appears to recede, making the space seem bigger.

All these subtle level changes create shadow gaps that are lit with LED strips, making it just as dramatic by night as it is by day when viewed from the sofa.

Anyone with a small garden or courtyard could take inspiration from these ideas. But there is some sorcery, too, in this artful garden. The tiny aluminium planters behind the corner bench are filled with bun moss which has been preserved to keep its vivid emerald colour in perpetuity.

The dramatic living wall down one side is a very effective fake, the artificial ferns needing only to be hosed down of dust once a year. “I understand how lovely real living walls can be,” Keightley says, “but in a confined space they can become unruly and overgrown.” Every artist needs his tricks.

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