Many of the most successful garden designs link indoor and outdoor space by using colour, materials and even furniture to create a seamless transition.
Sometimes it’s called ‘blurring the boundaries’ between house and garden.
Both Francine and Lisa are part of Whitstable Open Gardens, so you can see their gardens in person. They’re among the 12 Whitstable Joy Lane gardens opening for the NGS on May 22nd. There are a further 12 Whitstable Town gardens opening on July 3rd. And Whitstable is a charming seaside town, with lots of good pubs and restaurants, so these are two great days out for garden lovers.
There are thousands of private gardens open for the NGS around England and Wales.
Start with your house
If you’re doing a major home renovation or extension, Lisa recommends you finish it before doing your garden or hiring a garden designer.’Sometimes clients ask me to design their garden before they have work on the house done. But I always advise them that the garden design starts with the house. You may change your mind or do things differently from the original plan.’
If you want your indoor and outdoor space to flow naturally from one to the other, then interior flooring or colour choices may be the inspiration for the garden, Lisa says. ‘It’s so important that the garden is right for the house or for the style of the people who live there.’
Connect indoor and outdoor space with glass doors
When Francine bought her house, there was just a standard door out onto a concrete space. So she had French windows – double glass doors – made in the style of the house. If you have a more contemporary taste, you can do the same with today’s modern bifold doors. Either will give you a year-round view of the garden.
She also had the concrete yard covered in decking.
Think about indoor and outdoor flooring to link the spaces
If you have a room that opens onto the garden, think about making the space flow by using similar looking flooring material and pavers. It’s often not practical to take exactly the same flooring through from inside to outside, but pick a harmonious colour. Lisa has a pale grey floor in her kitchen, which leads onto a pale grey deck. Further down the garden, gravel and pavers carry the colour theme on.
And Francine has used an outdoor rug on the deck near her house. It gives the sense that the deck is almost a room in the house.
Link indoor and outdoor space by zones
Lisa has zoned both her kitchen and garden. The kitchen has a working zone, eating zone and relaxing zone. So she’s carried the zone approach out into the garden.
First, there is a deck directly outside the kitchen. The kitchen floor and the deck are a similar shade, and the furniture in both areas is monochrome and mid-century modern. The sofa inside and the chairs outside are both in 1950s styles and a similar dark grey colour.
The second garden zone is more formal, with evergreen strips of geometric euonymus. Formal garden design works well both in modernist and traditional spaces, so it’s a good choice for linking the mid-century modern theme of the deck with the wilder and more relaxed garden style at the end of the garden.
Lisa’s house and garden are a typical Victorian terrace, so the house is tall and narrow, and the garden is long and thin. Zoning works particularly well in long thin spaces, but the principle works whatever shape your house and garden are.
Francine also divides her gardens into zones, with a more designed area close to the house, and getting wilder as she gets further from the house.
You don’t have to have the eating area directly outside the house, although it can be convenient. In 5 garden design tips and 2 to avoid, garden designer Charlotte Rowe suggests having the eating area where you get the best light and views rather than automatically placing it directly outside the back door.
Echo colours inside and out
Francine’s approach to linking the indoor and outdoor space is based on colour. ‘We’re on the coast and I have a yellow brick house with a grey slate roof,’ she says. So she has chosen a sandy yellow and blue-grey as signature colours. She shops from junk shops, antique markets and chain stores. And then she often paints them in one of these colours.
‘People say it’s so clever to have everything looking as if it fitted together like this,’ she says. ‘But it’s not clever at all. You just have a big pot of paint to hand, and you paint everything with it.’
It’s worth saying that she doesn’t paint everything as she also has a theme of galvanised metal/zinc. This is also in keeping with the ‘grey’ theme. So although she has lots of different sizes and shapes of pots, planters and objet trouves, they all look good together.
Francine uses yellow and grey in the house, too. However, when it comes to planting and flower colour, she says she varies it from year to year. She enjoys experimenting with different colour combinations.
Co-ordinate interior design with garden design
Lisa and her family like mid-century modern style. So the sofas and chairs in both the kitchen and on the deck immediately outside the kitchen are all mid-20th century styles.
You can even extend this with your choice of house plants and the plants you see immediately outside the house. For example, Lisa has quite big-leafed jungly house plants near the bi-fold doors, and picks up on the jungle theme with a big corten steel box of bamboo immediately outside on the deck.
Then as you go further away, down the garden, into the different zones, there’s more of a traditional English planting.
Use house plants indoors and outside
Lisa’s shop, Fuchsia Green, sells lots of house plants, so she’s very experienced in knowing which plant should go where. Placing house plants is like positioning plants in the garden, she says.
‘It’s like choosing garden plants – right plant, right place,’ she says. When you choose houseplants, take note of what conditions they need. Some house plants are happier in low light or can tolerate bright sun. Others are more resistant to draughts.
If you have big patio doors that are often open, then the house plants in that area will need to be able to deal with changes in temperature, too.
You can bring some plants inside in the winter and take them out onto the terrace in summer.
Winter interest is key for linking indoor and outdoor space
‘You don’t go into the garden as much in winter,’ says Francine. ‘So it’s important to have something to look at from the house.’ She has a table directly outside her French windows which she uses to create winter interest. There is usually a display of evergreens and a small sculpture, for example.’
Lisa’s garden is more on view during the winter because the whole of the back of the garden is glass bifold doors. She uses evergreen planting and pots.
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