Telephone Technique Pt II (Meeting the Client)

In the second part of this video tutorial on sales techniques for garden designers, I look at meeting the client. 

I discuss how to manage this meeting, what to say and when to say it and most important of all how to discussing budgets and design fees.

If you haven’t seen the first part,  click here and watch this  first.

In next months tutorial, we will look at design fees and how to calculate  fees based on both time and % based fee basis.

If you have any ideas on other tutorials you would find useful, please let me know!

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The importance of Telephone Technique!

Today’s video tutorial is on telephone technique and the importance of opening and closing a sale

FEE SCALE

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5 Golden Landscape Design Rules

 

Rule 1: The House is the Most Important Part of Any Garden.

You can’t ignore it! It’s almost always the largest, most dominant structure in the garden. Your journey starts and ends with the house and therefore any garden plan, should always start from the building and work outwards.

Rule 2: The Designers Main Objective is to Link Building with Site.

Probably the most important rule of all and yet the one that is least understood. This rule applies to any landscape scheme, whether residential or commercial. If the design is to be successful, then it must blend the building seamlessly into its environment. To achieve this, the designer needs to be able to combine symmetry with biology, i.e. architecture with landscape. Because most buildings are made from geometric shapes and the garden is essentially a biological environment, great care is needed to join these two opposing forms together. Try linking them too quickly and they will clash, creating a meaningless amorphous squiggle where the house looks like it’s just landed from space.

Rule 3 All shape close to the house should be Symmetrical.

This follows on from rule 2. Because the building is predominantly made up of straight lines based on squares and rectangles, the area around the building should copy these geometric, mathematical shapes to help link the house with the garden. The terraces, paths, formal pond and planting beds should be designed using straight lines.

If you don’t believe me, I will try to convince you by using an interior design analogy. “You would not put an amoebic shaped rug into a rectangular shaped room. Instead you would use a geometrical rug/carpet.” The same rules of interior design are just a relevant for outside design. The lawn is the carpet of the garden and the worst thing you can do, is to put a wiggly edged lawn into a rectangular shaped garden. Creating wiggles and squiggles won’t make your garden look natural. Nature makes it natural! As soon as you add planting to a straight edged border the plants grow and spill over and soften all the hard lines.

Rule 4 Use a Grid to help you Design.

Because you want your garden to link back to the house, it make sense to use shapes and pattern on your plan, that relate back to the scale and proportion of the building. “The Scale of the Grid is derived from the Mass of the Property”. Every grid is unique to site. This may in reality appear subliminal, but using a grid which is derived from the proportions and scale of the building means that all the patterns you use for the garden plan, relate directly back to the house and the grid also acts as a guide for the designer so they can quickly check size and scale of different features.

Rule 5 There are No Rules.

This isn’t strictly true because I have just given you a small sample of some. However you first need to understand the rules of geometry and design before you can break them. If we all stuck rigidly to rules, we would end up with some very dull design, but conversely, few universities and colleges give any clear guidance to design teaching, so that students graduate without a clear design philosophy.

At the Oxford College of Garden Design we run a professional On-line postgraduate level course and together with our sister site MyGardenSchool we also offer 4 week On-line short courses in all aspects of gardening. One of the main reasons our students have been so successful, is that we do teach a design philosophy by verbalising and explaining why something works and why something doesn’t.

How to Create a Viewport in VectorWorks

How to create a viewport in Vectorworks

This video tutorial was created in response to a student request to remind him how to create a viewport in Vectorworks™

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Specifications for Garden Designer Pt 3

The relationship between drawn and written information

On the smallest of schemes, annotated details may be all that is necessary and putting specification and drawing together may also assist the contractor.

However, on larger projects there is a danger that the specification will become dispersed onto several drawings, with repetition and contradictions creeping in. To avoid this, it is recommended that all the specification is found in one place. The drawn details can then linked to the appropriate specification description by systematic cross referencing, using the specifications own clause numbers.

This then leaves the question of the more general information such as the quality of topsoil or the strength of mortar? It is rarely adequate to leave such details to the expertise and discretion of the chosen contractor. In order to provide a professional service to your client, it often requires at least a few pages of specification separate from the drawings attached to the planting schedules, or the letter of invitation to tender.

An imperfect solution

I have touched on some of the obstacles which confront the designer and the contractor when faced with agreeing and achieving the desired standards on site;

• the need for reasonable financial certainty without being too restrictive,
• the huge amount of technical and contractual knowledge required;
  
• the designers’ time needed to tie up the more important loose ends,
  
• the absence of a simple appropriate standard form of contract.
  

Few projects are standard. Most are unique ‘prototypes’ designed and detailed from scratch.
Using an identical specification on every project, is therefore not only inappropriate, but may also be dangerous.

The concept of a ‘model’ specification is rather different from a standard solution because, the ‘model’ specification is designed to be edited by the designer to remove all extraneous information and to insert any additional information the particular project requires. The result is a tailor made document which should help the contractor.

Producing a project specification takes time and eats into the fee but the time is reduced with practice. No specification can be totally comprehensive. The designer’s decision on what to put in and what to leave out is a matter of judgement. That judgement will be made based on several factors such as the complexity of the project, the known competence of the contractor and whether the designer will be visiting site during the construction phase. Specification writing tries to be exact but in practice is an imprecise art.

A ‘model’ specification

The essentials of a ‘model’ specification are three-fold:
First it provides a familiar ‘structure’ within which every subject has its logical place.
Finding the appropriate instructions becomes quicker and easier because of this.
Secondly it can provide a check list of subjects which may need the designer’s attention. The designer can decide either to delete the subject as inappropriate or to include it with or without amendment.
Finally, by offering the designer a model clause the designer has guidance on written style and technical content.
I am sure that many designers have heard of the NBS Landscape Specification or the more modest publication “Specification Writing for Garden Design”(2) These model specifications can provide help and much needed technical guidance for the hard pressed Garden Designer. Writing a specification from scratch is a very daunting task; using a model specification makes that task considerably easier.

Even the best project specification and drawings in the world will not produce high quality work from a poor contractor. Things are less likely to go wrong with a good contractor. So every designer’s priority should be to assemble a list of good local contractors.
Then, provide them with all that essential specification information in writing by one means or another so that a proper price is tendered. Things are less likely to go wrong if the contractor has tendered a realistic price and is in possession of all the relevant information from the start. If things do go wrong, you and your client are better protected if the required quality is defined clearly and concisely.

Specifications for Garden Designer Pt 2

Most designers find specification writing a necessary evil.

Is it even necessary?

In a limited number of cases a formal specification document is probably not needed provided the essential information is given to the contractor in some other written form.

The two types of information

The written information traditionally included in a specification is divided into two main categories –the contractual obligations commonly known as the Preliminaries and General Conditions (the quality of workmanship and materials). Essential content of the Preliminaries which are vital to most projects are the start and finish dates, insurance and health and safety requirements. There are, of course other things which may need to be agreed such as the protection of existing trees, the arrangement of stage payments for work completed or the limitation of working hours, but these matters are often partly covered in a standard form of contract such as those issued by the JCLI, JCT.

The problem is that none of these standard forms of contract is entirely appropriate for small garden projects and even when they are used, they are usually completed after negotiations have taken place and a price agreed. Vital information such as the examples given above is needed before the contractor can tender a firm price. The designer is therefore left with the need to confirm such matters in writing at the beginning of the tendering process.

The options for defining quality

Before attempting to answer the above, let us first consider the question of quality. Unlike contractual and administrative matters, quality is very much more difficult to define. One way is to specify a brand name, but this may financially restrict the contractor unnecessarily.

Another method is to refer to Standards, published by the British Standards Institute or to other standards such as the National Plant Specification. Incorporating another standard by reference is often the most comprehensive and fool-proof method. However this requires a degree of knowledge about the content of those standards, both by the designer and the contractor and this is not always available.

Thirdly, the designer may write a description of quality themselves. To do so, requires practice and the development of a concise and an unambiguous style of writing and requires an depth of knowledge and skill that only the most accomplished parishioners should attempt.

In a limited number of instances, the most direct method of controlling quality is a reference to an agreed sample. This approach can be particularly appropriate for the appearance of hard landscape features like paving or walls.

The sample may be one which is constructed on site by the contractor prior to the start of the main work, or a previously constructed project preferably by the same craftsman. The advantage of a sample is that the client can be fully involved and can understand exactly what they are getting right from the start of the contract.

The use of samples

allows the contractor and his craftsmen to contribute to the creative process and gives them a positive involvement which not only draws on the contractors’ expertise but raises the craftsmen’s commitment and morale.

Monitoring the performance of the contractor is also simplified by making a direct comparison between what is built and the agreed sample.
So not every specification for quality depends solely on a long written description, but, given that there are several possible approaches to specifying quality, all of them in the end will require a degree of written clarification.

Q&A
Do you always right a specification?

Do you use a 'Model Specification' or do you write your own clauses?

Please let me know I'm always interested in you feed back and comments

Specifications for Garden Designer Pt 1

The importance of a Specification

Contractual problems can arise on any project what ever its size. However, the larger and more complex a project the more scope there is for arguments with the Contractor because the amount of money at stake is potentially larger.

The Client who is faced with additional , unexpected and perhaps avoidable costs is not going to be pleased and may hold the Designer liable. The way to avoid argument is to produce clear "documents", i.e. drawings, schedules, specifications and instructions, so that your Client, all the Tenderers' and the appointed Contractor fully understand your design intentions.

What a Specification is

The Specification is a written description of requirements. On a small, simple project it may be possible to cover the necessary information by writing specification notes on the drawing. On most contracts a separate document is usually necessary.

For convenience the Specification is normally divided into two sections. The first section deals with administrative matters and is commonly called the Preliminaries. The second section defines the quality of workmanship, materials and plants required.

The Specification should be used to define quality and sequence of work etc. while the drawing is best for defining shape, size and location.

Few designers bother with specification writing and those that do, often don’t fully understand the full legal implications of this document.

In this litigious world, sooner or later one of us is going be sued and the line between bankruptcy and survival could well be a comprehensively written specification.

The Specification and its relationship to the Contract

You should always advise your Client to enter into a written Contract . Any Specification should be one of the "contract documents". The Contract is between your Client and the Landscape Contractor. You, as Designer, are not a party to the contract although your role as agent for your Client should be defined in the Contract.

Model Specifications

At the Oxford College of Garden Design we have written are own ‘Model Specification’ published by Packard Publishing which has been widely adopted as the industry standard.

Aimed at novice and professional garden designers, this work book explains a method of producing instructions for garden design work which can be tailored to an individual designer's current project.

It has been developed over many years and most importantly is thoroughly tried and tested. It has been kept deliberately brief and is flexible enough to allow designers to expand or condense it to suit their needs, and to allow use of their favourite products and plants.
Students and newly-qualified garden designers will find the model specification particularly useful both as a contract document and as a technical check-list; it can be used on the smallest projects where the specification clauses are annotated directly on drawings or plans or as an independent document.

The overall format assumes a designer is acting as an independent consultant and not as an employee or partner of a contractor offering a package design and build service.

My Concerns!

What worries me is that specification in the UK is often taught by tutors with a limited understanding of the legal implications or worse still, by former contractors that often have a very biased attitude to specifications and see them at little more than a nuisance.

Making a specification short and simple yet comprehensive enough to avoid ambiguity is extremely difficult. Those that advocate writing your own specification can not possibly expect students to have enough skill and understanding of the subject to prepare documents that are legally water tight? Yet this is exactly what is happening today in many courses across the UK.

Your comments and feedback are always welcome

5 Applications to Help you Design Your Own Garden

 

This article, I admit to writing with a massive pinch of salt, because most people understand that the computer is only as creative as the person using it.

At The Oxford College of Garden Design we teach VectorWorks Landmark, but this is  expensive and more complex than most homeowners need. For those wishing to have a go them selves, we have several 4 week online courses at MyGardenSchool on both planting and landscape design. The following list of software I hope may be of interest to those wishing to have a go themselves.

SmartDraw 2010
SmartDraw is a drawing application to design floor plans business graphics, diagrams and charts of all kinds. The program improves communication, organization, management and planning by drawing any processes. If you know Microsoft’s Visio, this program will be familiar to you. The application also has tutorials to help.

DeltaCad
DeltaCad is more than just a paint program, because you can edit, scale, move, rotate, copy, etc. individual objects, not just paint pixels. DeltaCad allows you to zoom in to draw fine details or zoom out to see the whole drawing.

 

Showoff Home Design
The program features many in-built tools and options. The user needs Internet connection to work with the application. It features a category list with an option to choose annuals. The catalogue tab helps to choose from landscape plants, home improvements, furnishings and décor, or other items that cover a broad range of home improvements.

Realtime Landscaping Architect
New landscape design software for creating professional plans and presentations. Design houses, decks, fencing, yards, gardens, swimming pools, water features, and much more with easy-to-use tools. Give your plans a hand-drawn look using a wide variety of plant symbols and colour washes. Add plant labels automatically using the wizard, and add a plant legend with just a few mouse clicks.

Home Designer Landscape and Deck
With Home Designer Landscape & Deck by Chief Architect Software you can plan and design your perfect outdoor living space! Landscape & Deck makes it easy to quickly design the virtual look and feel of your backyard, deck, patio, pool or other outdoor project. Just point-and-click to add pre-arranged landscaping beds and any of over 4,000 Library items and over 3,600 realistic plants to your design.

Double Gold for Former Students at Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

The Oxford College of Garden Design has two students who have won Gold at this years RHS Hampton Court Flower Show
Dan Lobb won gold and Best Conceptual Garden and Melissa Jolly got a Gold for her garden entitled ‘Picturesque’ also in the Conceptual category.

Dan’s garden is a subterranean underworld. Above ground the garden may appear somewhat austere with steel periscopes surrounding a tilted panel of turf - but gaze through a periscope and you can enjoy your own private view of the extraordinary garden below.
The undulating landscape of Landscape Obscured is planted entirely with edible fungi interwoven with mosses and liverworts surrounds a “lake”. The imagination feasts on this surreal, subterranean world reminiscent of fairytale forests while the angular, modernist steelwork reflects Man’s relationship with the land. Fungi form the longest living and largest communities on earth and are often overlooked. This garden provides a glimpse of these fascinating life forms.

While Melissa’s garden aims to evoke the works of specific artists or genres through the use of planting. By replicating the layout of an art gallery, openings in the gallery walls frame the different compositions of planting and the viewer’s attention is focused on each contrasting picture.
Picturesque illustrates how both gardens and plants can be seen as forms of art, and demonstrates a method for creating beautiful views even when external space is limited.

Gold Medal for Former Student

Melissa Jolly a former student of the Oxford College of Garden Design has been awarded an RHS Gold Medal for her 2011 Hampton Court Show garden entitled ‘Picturesque’
This unique and innovative installation is more art than garden, using plants to represent famous paintings.  Designed as a gallery, the public are invited in to so a series of recessed pictures made up of a combination of collage, photography and planting.
As part of our online diploma course student have to design a Chelsea Flower Show garden as an exercise and are taught to think outside the box. 

Melissa, who has already won several other medals for her show gardens says “that this exercise was invaluable in helping her think creatively.  I wouldn’t design a garden like this for a client, but this show that I can create something special for my clients.”
She then went on to say “I can't quite believe it and have had some really lovely feedback from the press...esp. The Independent journalist who said I should see if I can take it to the Royal Academy”

We would like to extend our congratulations to Mel for her well deserved award and hope this spurs all are students on to bigger and better things.

Why Good Designers Need To Be Good Problem-Solvers Too

Behind every good garden designer you will find – a problem-solver extraordinaire because no design, whether you’re creating a sculpture, a piece of furniture or a beautiful garden will work unless you crack the challenges the project presents.

As the great 20th Century American landscaper once stated: Function Follows Form which, for the designer, means an alchemy of science, common sense and artistic flair or, if you like, a kind of “magical marriage” that needs to take place.

When we teach garden design, we introduce two entirely polar approaches to designing space which is often a difficult concept for students to grasp. You have a given site, which is a given shape and a building (the house or the office if you are landscaping a different kind of project) and your job, as the designer, is the blend the architecture with biology.

This is no mean feat, especially when dealing with smaller spaces and at the same time you are considering the functional or logical organisation of the space you are also working with the artistic element that will appear to effortlessly blend the building with the land.

The first of our two design approaches is what we call Pattern Analysis Design (PAD). Faced with a site plan, the designer creates an interlocking pattern as they design the garden and then allocate different materials – grass, water, paving, planting for example, to each space. This is the design method favoured by the brilliant British designer, John Brookes OBE, but is sadly often very misunderstood.

The second design approach is Survey Analysis Design (SAD) which, as its acronym implies and without the introduction of Pattern Analysis Design as well, can often lead to, literally, very sad, uninspired designs. With the SAD approach, the designer is looking purely at the functional side of how space is allocated and placing the key elements – the terrace, the garage, the vegetable garden – before considering the overall design of the plot.

The fact is, you need to be able to combine both these approaches to design a space that really resonates with its environment and to do that, you need to understand how people behave in a particular space and keep that in mind as you design.

One of the best examples of this is to think about what people do when they walk up to your front door and ring the bell. They ring the bell and they then step back away from the door. What that means, for the designer, is that the area around the front door is a key space which needs sufficient paving to allow someone to step back but still remain in the door “zone.”

A narrow pathway leading to that front door will force visitors to march along, crocodile style and the person who opens the door will not be able to see everyone who is approaching. Similarly, a path to the bench at the bottom of the garden needs to be at least 1.5m wide to allow two people to walk comfortable alongside each other.

So a huge part of good design requires an understanding and appreciation of ergonomics and the psychology of how people use space. Without this, no design, however impressive on paper, is going to work for the people using that space and without this understanding, no design will work properly.

Introducing The New Student Showcase

When we first had the idea of introducing a new ex-student showcase to our website, we had no idea we would be quite so spoiled for choice with a long list of Oxford College of Garden Design postgraduates who have, often very quickly, gone on to stamp their individual marks on the world of international garden design.

What we realised, as we started to invite our former students to feature in our showcase which goes live later this year, is that we really can boast an amazing and long - 17 years since we first started our postgraduate diploma course in residential landscape architecture - track record of training some of the best-known landscape designers anywhere in the world.

When I started the course, all those years ago, I wanted to do two things; give something back to the world of garden design and share my passion for good design with others but I had no real idea, back then, many of our 300 or so Alumni would be among the next generation of top designers.

Interestingly, the very word Alumni comes from the Latin alere which means to nourish and nourishing raw talent among our students is one of the most exciting aspects of teaching our garden design course which has been described by our industry as probably the most prestigious course of its kind, anywhere in the world.

The new student showcase will launch with the work and urban design philosophy of London-based designer, Charlotte Rowe (http://www.charlotterowe.com/) who you will know, if you ever have the pleasure of meeting her, is a one-woman force of nature.

After a long and high profile career in public relations, Charlotte joined our course in September 2003 and within a year was featured in a Channel 4 programme on mid-career switches across a range of different professions. Never one to let the grass grow under her feet, Charlotte capitalised on this exposure and her designs were soon being featured in both the specialist garden press and mainstream magazine supplements.

Today, just 5 years after she walked away with her postgraduate diploma in Residential Landscape Architecture, Charlotte can name her price and pick and choose her projects, both at home and overseas.

Other alumni who have achieved a similar high profile alongside respect from their peers include Sarah Price who studied fine art before joining our course and who, after winning three RHS medals during her rapid rise to the top, has just landed the prestigious honour of designing the Olympic botanical garden for the 2012 games.

I have always maintained that once trained, our students need to work as designers for between three and five years before they finally find their own style and way of interpreting the design ethos we have taught them. Just as a writer must find their own “voice”, a designer needs to find that special something that makes their work unique and it is seeing the early emergence of this magic ingredient in our student designers that gives me a real buzz every time I walk into the classroom at the start of our academic year.

Announcing the World’s First Professional Online Garden Design Course

Online Garden Design Courses.

There's a lot misconception regarding the word online. Our new course is not a correspondence course you download from the web; it truly is online.

All lectures will be watched as on-line video tutorials. There will be interactive online exercises and students will talk to their tutors using web chat and classes will be given via webinars.

This is the closest you can get to being in the classroom attending the lectures in person!

Unlike other colleges, we have refused to offer a correspondence course in garden design as we didn’t believe you could teach art through the post.

Statistically only 3% of people who start a traditional correspondence course, finish them and most courses are little more than very expensive books with telephone support.

Our whole design program has been specially rewritten to make the best use of this new technology and consequently you benefit from a 50% increase in course content.

You will be allocated your own tutor and will follow the course timetable along side the other full time students, participating via the forum, online gallery, monthly webinars and with 1-2-1 tutor feedback.

Our interactive online garden design course is also available to existing classroom taught students, allowing them to revisit lecturers online all the time, as well as overseas students, or those unable to travel, giving them the next best thing to live studio lectures via interactive video tutorials delivered via the internet.

You will be able as listen to your lectures as many times as you wish so as to maximise your learning potential, and you will even be able to listen to the lectures on your iPod/phone/MP3 player while out and about or in the car.

Lectures will be time released to co-inside with the classroom taught program, so both online and face to face students will learn together.

You need to consider your online garden design course as a full time course, requiring a minimum of 25 hours of study a week.

Hand-in dates are strictly enforced. Student who fail to submit work on time are subject to the same rules and regulations as the full time students. (see terms and conditions)

All online material including tutored support is available to students for a period of 24 months from the course start date, after which students have the option a paying an annual subscription if you wish to maintain access to updated course content.

Next Course Start date
30^th September 2010
Click here for further information

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The Society of Garden Designers; a damp squib washed up on the shores of mediocrity.

Are so called professional body; the Society of Garden Designers, has forced through what I consider to be the worst piece of legislation in its pitiful 30 year history.
It has decreed that from 2010, if you want to apply to become even a lowly corresponding member you have to submit work before a panel of your peers to be weighed, measured and no double found wanting!
Its bad enough having to apply for full membership in this patronising and archaic fashion, but to expect potential probationary members to go through this as well is frankly bonkers.



It doesn’t take a genius to realise that the whole membership thing is in a mess.  Why is it that the membership ratio of full members to corresponding has never risen much abou 1-10.
That’s right;  after 30+ year there are only about 180 full members of the society in the whole world!  This despite consecutive councils trying their best to up the numbers.
Councils discuss the same things and make the same mistakes time in, time out, like some giant horticultural ground hog day.
They think by vetting the ‘newbie's’ and putting a 2 year time limit on them to apply for full membership they will improve things. 
Far from it! I predict the membership will fall further and the organisation will become even more redundant than it already is.
In any other professional organisation, education is the route to full membership.  Surveyor, engineer, architect, all have to have a first degree before they can apply.
Unfortunately the SGD has been too much of a coward to go down this route, because so many of the founding members have a vested interest in the lucrative garden design education market.
Take away the corresponding members and you don’t have a viable membership.  So the Society  has become little more than a Surrogate training centre for sub- standard design schools.
It’s not until students have completed one of these lesser courses, that they realise how poor their training has been, only to be taken up by the SGD’s seminar program which in itself is a poor substitute for proper tutorage.
Instead of this controversial adjudication panel, I propose the SGD introduce and examination.  This could then be sold to the schools and colleges at a profit and would weed out those courses not capable of passing it.
The colleges could then use there exam marks as a guide to the quality of the course.
If they still wish to have a period of professional practice before full membership then so be it, but stop this lunacy before more of us give up on you and don’t renew our memberships.

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Oxford College of Garden Design Introduces Its Post-Graduate Students to John Brookes MBE – A Man Described As One Of The Most Influential Garden Designers of the 20th Century.

I had been asking for years but what with one thing and another, it had just never quite happened. So imagine my delight (never mind the thrill for our students) when the man who’s been described by many as “The greatest living contemporary garden designer” agreed to spend the entire day with us in the classroom at Oxford Brookes University as part of our popular Postgraduate Diploma in Residential Landscape Architecture course (http://www.ocgd.org/).

Now it’s not often I get to see my post-graduate students star-struck – many of them come from highly successful previous careers, albeit in different fields, and so have been accustomed to mixing with The Great and The Good - but there was a definite air of excitement as they arrived in class on the big day with their cameras, their John Brookes textbooks for him to sign and their own garden designs to show the man himself.

I was trained by John and so know that although he can be, initially, somewhat shy, with the right audience he will soon warm to his theme and that anyone with an interest in garden design who is lucky enough to meet him in person will come away deeply inspired.

The students were not disappointed. John presented a MasterClass in Garden Design which included his thoughts on how the subject has changed, even in his lifetime and what the next big trends are likely to be. He very generously gave us a whole day of his time and not only critiqued the students’s own work (for those who asked him to take a look) but talked us through many of his own past and present projects.

A designer, teacher, author and lecturer, John has designed well over 1,000 gardens for clients all over the world and was awarded both an MBE for services to horticulture and garden design in Britain and an Award of Distinction by the American Association of Professional Landscape Designers.

He says “I like to create a simple bold design which I then plant up generously.” As with all gurus, he makes it look easy and sound simple but our students understand that achieving that apparent simplicity demands a high level of skill and design ability.

You can see John’s design skills and learn more about his extraordinary contribution to garden design by visiting http://www.denmans-garden.co.uk/.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever manage to persuade him to come and inspire my students in the same way again but I do know he had a good time spending the day with them, sharing the insider tips he has picked up along the way and that each and every one of them walked away with a deep respect for the genius of my former teacher and mentor and a man I am proud to call a friend.

5 Tips for Planning the Perfect Outside Dining Space

The dining terrace is without question the most important part of any garden.  It is the link between the artificial environment of the house and the biological environment of the garden. You start and finish your journey round the garden and its the area on which most outside activity takes place.

If the terrace doesn’t work the rest of the garden won’t either!

1) Position

Keep the dining area close to where the food is prepared. You don’t want to have to walk miles with plates and cutlery let alone freshly prepared food.  So for this reason, it is most likely going to be next to the house.  However in is some warmer climates I have built “summer kitchens” which are away from the main home, usually next to the swimming pool or tennis court.  These are fully fitted outside kitchens complete with fridge stove and can be undercover with an adjoining dining area.

 

2) Scale

Scale is vital in all design but even more so when it come to the dinning area.  the first thing you have to remember is that outside furniture is usually significantly larger, therefore you will need a much larger outdoor space than you would if you were planning the same space indoors.   The other major area of importance is circulation space.  i.e. the area around the perimeter of the table for people to move, serve food or pull their chairs out when leaving the table. Unlike interior spaces where people are prepared to squeeze behind chairs to enter or exit, outside you need at least 1m (3ft) behind the chairs to comfortable accommodate pedestrian flow.

3) Material & Detail

For obvious reasons any surfacing material needs to be hard wearing if the  dining space is to be a permanent fixture. Stone, and concrete, make perfect paving materials while decking works well provided it is sufficiently supported by large enough joints to avoid any bounce.  Because you and your guests will spend so much time in this one position, if budgets and site permit, you can also spend more time and money here on paving detailing,  as it will be more likely to be appreciated.

The exception to the rule is the temporary dining area, which may only be used once then moved.  These are placed on lawns or under trees for their view or their romantic atmosphere

4) Aspect

There is something quite special about eating next to water, be it a swimming pool, pond or even the Ocean, water adds a magical quality to the dining space.  The only proviso would be to double the circulation space to 2m (6ft) as sitting to close to water can give guests an uncomfortable feel.

If you can’t provide water then planting is the next best thing.  Surround the dining area with soft planting that provides a cocooning feel without blocking the views.  Grasses and translucent perennial planting is perfect for this as it created just enough screening without feeling claustrophobic.

5) Privacy & Screening

In urban areas, privacy when eating can be difficult to achieve.  In these circumstances an overhead arbour or pergola comes into its own.  Not only do they provide screening, but also create a human scale to the outside space, so important in making people feel comfortable. 

The Arbour doesn’t have to be very heavy to give the subliminal feeling of a roof, but at the same time can control light quality (depending on the choice of climber) and provide shade, as fewer of us now enjoy eating, unprotected from the damaging effects of the sun.

Duncan Heather is Director and principal of the Oxford college of Garden Design which runs an Online diploma course and 4 week online short courses in all aspects of gardening

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