Following the sun : Grey Gables, Buckinghamshire The home of Liz Houghton

A contemporary extension to an Arts-and-Crafts house led to a reassessment of the whole garden, rationalising the space and bringing shaded areas back into use, finds Tiffany Daneff

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As so often happens, the building of a new extension was the catalyst to take a fresh look at an existing garden. To this end, Liz Houghton, who has lived at Grey Gables, a 1904 Arts-and-Crafts house in Buckinghamshire, since 1998, contacted the plantsman designer Sean Walter. ‘My brief to Sean was to create a modern relaxed garden, that connected effortlessly with the house and new contemporary extension,’ says Mrs Houghton, the founder in 2009 of the fashion label Mint Velvet. ‘I loved the trend of indoor-outdoor living and wanted different spaces for different occasions at different times of the day as the sun moves around the house.’ This was essential, as Grey Gables sits on the top of a slope with the garden wrapping around the front and sides. The high hedges and several mature trees added to the potential for the sun casting deep shade.

For Mr Walter, the key to rationalising the garden, with its several terraces, paths, lawns and driveway, as well as a swimming pool, was to ‘separate the car-parking area from the main lawn and to hide it from the main view from the house’. Once this was done, he could focus on defining the individual seating areas—giving each its own atmosphere— improving the paths and the planting alongside them and accentuating the path to the front door. When they began work about seven years ago, the extension hadn’t been started, which meant the landscape plan could be conceived at the same time.

Wherever you approach from, there is a wonderful vista

‘I didn’t want to use a solid hedge, so we put in pleached hornbeams and four columns of Portuguese laurel,