Project Value*
£100,000
There’s No Place Like Home – The Arts and Crafts Garden
When Bob and Fiona were offered the opportunity to undertake the restoration of Fiona’s former childhood home, they simply couldn’t resist. Backing onto The Carrs and the River Bollin, this beautiful 1920s Arts and Crafts style house, is a fabulous home with a whole lot of family history.
Far more than mere bricks and mortar, our childhood homes hold deep, emotional connections as places of unconditional love, the backdrop for our childhood memories and arguably the place where we feel we most truly belong.
The Cheshire Garden Design Studio was tasked with translating Fiona’s deeply rooted connection to her childhood home into a garden worthy of this beautiful family history.
Seamlessly interwoven into the architecture of the house, The Cheshire Garden Design Studio has crafted a beautiful, sophisticated and elegant garden design, inspired by perhaps the most influential Arts and Crafts garden designer of the early 20th Century, Gertrude Jekyll.
The planting, beautiful, blousy and full of Fiona’s mum’s favourite roses: Handel, Adélaïde d’Orléans and The Generous Gardener, immortalises Jekyll’s belief that the love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. For, in momentous full circle, this story returns to its beginnings: now it is Fiona, following her mother’s footsteps, who is guardian of this garden, tending the plants, herbs and vegetables, inheriting, not just her family home but her mother’s love for gardening.
The sumptuously, understated elegance of the terrace, lovingly restored from the original Yorkshire stone and crafted using traditional construction and heritage materials is the focal point of the garden, the design itself a feat of collaborative enterprise between the huge team of contractors.
Complete with planting pockets which conjure the evocative scent of roses from a bygone era, alongside herbs, rich in visual and aromatic appeal: uplifting mints, varieties of fragrant thyme, marjoram and sage, as well as tiers bursting with beautiful Allium, Anemones and Salvia cultivars, The Cheshire Garden Design Studio has encapsulated both the beauty of Jekyll’s ‘art meets garden’ style and the client brief of being transported back to her own childhood.
The Virginia creeper, devastatingly thought destroyed in the renovation, has incredibly grown anew, providing a fitting metaphor for this home and garden restoration where love is written into every corner, every plant, every piece of Cheshire brick and every flag of Yorkshire stone.
In beautiful contrast to the hard and soft landscaping of the formal garden is The Dell, overlooking the picturesque parkland beyond, perfect for practising the ancient art of forest bathing in an ever-evolving woodland landscape.
Carpeted in snowdrops in early spring, shrubs, bulbs and herbaceous plants enjoy the dappled shade throughout the rest of the year, perfect for providing cover for the family of foxes who have set up home there which fulfils the design brief to encourage more wildlife.
Where we come from, our family history, and our identity is deeply rooted in our homes and gardens. With incredible garden design, The Cheshire Garden Design Studio has really captured the concept of this garden: that there really is no place like home.
For providing a hugely supportive client relationship through a complex renovation in a challenging post-Covid market, whilst liaising with a large team of contractors, The Cheshire Garden Design Studio and Landigo Ltd have won Gold in the prestigious APL Awards’ Collaboration Category.
* These are approximate values at today’s prices (2024).
