Project

Nunhead Garden Design, London

A contemporary, natural garden built around a single idea: everything leads somewhere.

Nunhead Garden of Woodland Calm

A long, shaded Nunhead garden reworked in phases: a wider dining patio, a new retaining wall and steps, a garden room tucked among the trees, and no-turf planting in ferns, grasses and ornamental trees throughout.

Details

London, SE10

109m²

When we first arrived, the garden was accessible only through the house, with a patio just 1.38m deep, a single temporary step up to an uneven lawn, and a rear section given over to a shed, wood store and odd paving, hemmed in by an ivy-covered fence.

We extended the patio by a further metre for proper seating and dining, laying new porcelain paving and addressing the existing drainage issue with new channel drains and easy-access manhole covers along the way.

A new corten steel retaining wall replaces the old brickwork, with new brick and corten steps rebuilt for a smoother transition up into the garden.

At the far end, a garden room now sits among the trees, its facade finished in charred, dark timber to match the woodland feel, with sliding doors that stay out of the way in a compact space.

A pathway connects the patio to the garden room, running past new planting beds defined with a mild steel edge.

We took a no-turf approach throughout, working in ferns, grasses, perennials and ornamental trees suited to the garden's dappled, partially shaded light, while keeping much of what was already thriving.

Garden lighting keeps the space warm and usable on summer evenings, and visually interesting through the darker months too.

This project was as much about restraint as it was about change. Rather than clearing the garden and starting again, we worked with what it already had, mature shade, established planting, a strong sense of enclosure, and built a wider patio, a new retaining wall and a clear path around it. It's the kind of garden that rewards walking all the way down it, not just looking at it from the house.