A garden is a building problem before it is a planting one.
Levels, drainage, structure and light decide whether an outdoor room works. Everything else is finishing.
Four things we keep coming back to
The garden already has a design
Where the light falls, where the ground moves, where you already walk without thinking. Working with that costs less and looks inevitable. Working against it costs more and always looks imposed.
Structure outlives surface
A beautiful board on a poor frame is a two year space. The money that makes a terrace last goes into ground, drainage and frame, none of which appears in a photograph.
Design for October, not July
Anywhere is pleasant on the best evening of the year. The question worth designing for is whether you will still go out there when it is cool and the light has gone, which is a question about shade, fire and lighting.
One crew, start to finish
The same people do the groundworks and the finishes. Nothing is lost in a handover between trades, and there is nobody to blame it on, which concentrates the mind.
About this website
Emberline Outdoor Living is not a real company. This site is a concept created by CAI to demonstrate the design and build quality of the websites we make for small businesses.
Nothing here has been invented to look impressive. There are no reviews, ratings, awards, completed commissions, client names, staff profiles, service areas, addresses or phone numbers on this site, because none of them would be real. The photographs are licensed demonstration images and do not show work by the business named above. The project form validates properly but sends nothing anywhere.
Start with the space you have.
Photographs from the back door, taken in the late afternoon, tell us more than a brief does.