Aug. 25, 2025
Minerals
A garden house is more than just an outdoor structure—it’s a multifunctional space that can be used as a home office, relaxation retreat, guest suite, or creative studio. Whether you want a cozy hideaway or a fully functional living space, the right design choices can make all the difference. In this guide, we’ll explore essential design ideas and practical tips to help you create the perfect garden house that complements your lifestyle and enhances your outdoor space.
Before you begin planning your garden house, it’s important to define its primary purpose. Your intended use will influence the size, layout, and features of the structure. Here are some common uses:
Once you have a clear vision, you can plan accordingly to ensure that the space meets your specific needs.
The placement of your garden house plays a crucial role in its functionality and aesthetic appeal. Consider the following factors when deciding on the location:
A well-chosen location enhances both the practicality and ambiance of your garden house.
The materials you choose will impact the longevity, maintenance, and overall look of your garden house. Here are some popular options:
Each material has its benefits, so choose one that suits your style, budget, and climate conditions.
If you plan to use your garden house throughout the year, proper insulation and ventilation are essential.
A well-insulated and ventilated garden house ensures comfort no matter the season.
The interior layout and décor should reflect your needs while maximizing space efficiency. Here are some design tips:
Whether minimalist, rustic, or modern, your garden house should reflect your personal style.
Lighting is crucial for both functionality and ambiance. Consider a mix of natural and artificial lighting options:
If you require electricity for appliances, heating, or internet access, consult a professional for safe installation.
Your garden house should blend with its surroundings and enhance the beauty of your outdoor space. Consider these ideas:
A well-designed exterior ensures that your garden house feels like a natural extension of your backyard.
If you want an environmentally friendly garden house, incorporate sustainable materials and energy-efficient solutions:
An eco-friendly garden house benefits both you and the environment while reducing long-term costs.
The cost of building a garden house depends on factors such as size, materials, customization, and additional features. Here’s a rough breakdown:
To stay within budget, get multiple quotes from builders, prioritize essential features, and explore financing options if needed.
Creating the perfect garden house requires careful planning, quality materials, and thoughtful design. Whether you’re looking for a stylish backyard retreat, a productive home office, or a luxurious guest space, the key is to customize the structure to suit your needs while ensuring durability and comfort.
By selecting the right location, incorporating smart design features, and blending the space harmoniously with your garden, you can build a stunning and functional outdoor escape that adds long-term value to your home.
Would you like recommendations on specific designs or features based on your requirements? Let me know how I can help!
Before you start, think about how you are going to use your garden and what you need to make that happen. The first thing to think about is a seating area with some pretty garden chairs - preferably this should be near the house and if possible facing south west.
You may need space for some everyday practicalities like storage for toys or a washing line. Do you want a vegetable garden? What about space for your children? Any kind of garden will require compost, and serious gardeners might want a shed.
In a city garden, you will want to work out where you want to sit when you come home from work and whether you are going to have a garden full of plants or a simpler garden with elements such as beautiful paving and water, with either a wall or beautiful fence or planted boundaries.
If your garden is small, then try and work out your basic needs and stick to a simple design with one or two wow factors. Keep the planting simple, using grasses or roses with evergreen shrubs and plant pots overflowing with all your favourite seasonal planting.
If your garden is large then take some more time to envisage your space, working out what goes where and how you can divide up the space. Try to be bold and think about playing with scale.
Work out where the sun sets and plant accordingly so that the light of the evening sun catches on plants.
Pictured: Jinny Blom's London garden
Once you have decided where you are going to sit and relax in your garden, you need to think about structure. Are you going to have a hedge, a fence, arches, gates, sculpture, containers, or topiary? If your garden is small, think less is more. Try to avoid clutter by just incorporating three or five really good elements from the above list.
If your garden requires a tall hedge, you need to decide whether it will be evergreen, in which case yew is a wonderful choice. Yew needs good drainage so plant it very carefully and if you are on heavy soil you would need to backfill the planting hole with at least 200mm of grit. It also likes to be fed in the winter so feed it throughout the year and you will have a good hedge within 3-4 years. If you prefer a deciduous hedge, then hornbeam is good on clay soils and beech on lighter soils. Rugosa and other roses make beautiful hedges too.
In larger gardens, if your garden slopes downwards, a good idea is to make the most of the slope by adding a dividing line where the level changes. You can then create another 'room' which might open up to the countryside. The division can be a wall or a hedge, and it will probably also act as a windbreak.
If your garden slopes up away from the house, it might be better to have an open view of the garden, but with shorter divisions such as retaining walls and low hedging.
With small gardens, sometimes you can make your garden feel bigger by cutting off the view of most of the garden using hedges or fences, but using a mirror at the end to make the garden appear longer.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website KUBIAO.
Other structural elements can be particularly decorative. Arches add romance to a garden, especially if you grow roses up them. You can also have an arch with a trained crab apple tree each side to create an apple bower. A good height for an arch is 2.4m with a minimum width of 2m. Rosa 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' is a good rose for an arch as the flowers hang down.
Gates make excellent stopping points and the more decorative the better. If your garden is shady, then paint your gate in a light cream colour. Farrow & Ball’s 'String' is a good one, and I also like the darker 'Downpipe' for garden gates.
Fences come in all different shapes and sizes and don't necessarily have to block off views; a decorative fence can allow you to still see through to the landscape beyond.
Pictured: an Oxfordshire garden by Angel Collins, where hedges have been planted diagonally to create a sense of width in a narrow space.
Build on the good points of the garden. For example, if there is a lovely cherry tree or magnolia in the garden, then emphasise it by underplanting it with spring bulbs. Camassias look lovely with later-flowering cherries and narcissi work well with magnolias. I also love planting alliums and tulips in long grass.
Choose a point of interest if possible in the distance and open up the garden to that vista, making sure of course that you are not creating a wind tunnel at the same time. If you have a view, then enhance it by framing it with an avenue of trees or large shrubs.
Find ways to create vistas within the garden itself. You can make your own focal points, whether they are urns, or wall fountains, benches, troughs or a specimen rose, shrub or tree. It is always a good idea to light these up at night.
Architectural structures such as arches and pergolas also play a big part as focal points in the winter garden, when they are covered in snow or frost.
Pictured: Joanna Bird's west London garden
Lawns are a practically essential feature of an English garden, and there is nothing like a freshly mown lawn to provide the perfect background to all the borders and areas of longer grass.
If you do have areas of long grass, why not create a meadow-like garden and plant it with bulbs, snowdrops, crocus, camassias, tulips and alliums and even roses? The bulbs need to be increased every year by fifty per cent after the initial first year planting. This can be a really good way of creating a low maintenance garden as well as encouraging all sorts of wild flowers and insects. If you create uniform shapes and mow between these patterns, you will find the area will look tidy and natural.
If you want wildflowers, then you need to start a five to ten year regime of sowing the seeds of yellow rattle. Yellow rattle is a plant which survives on grass roots. It therefore thins grass in order for wildflowers to become more prolific. First of all, the areas of long grass need to be scarified in the autumn to reveal bare patches, and sow the yellow rattle. It needs eight weeks of cold in order to germinate, and you can resow in February. If possible ask kind friends for seed. You need to sow the seed every year for five years in the areas where the yellow rattle seed has not grown.
Pictured: The parterre meadow at Angel's home planted with tulips and alliums, with pillars of clipped hornbeam providing structure.
For most borders, start with the principle of the front, middle and back row, where you have three different height requirements: tallest at the back, shortest at the front. Next choose three perennials for each row which flower at different times of the year and repeat these in groups of three or five plants, making sure they are not in lines but groups. There is a danger that this could look overly neat, so try to encourage a bit of a wriggle in your planting–it doesn’t matter if your group merges into a different row.
Alternate spikey flowers with round flowers between the rows. To add romance add roses and for all year round interest add a shrub such as winter flowering viburnums or Magnolia stellata for spring.
For a border to look good all year round, you need to have a strong base of perennials among which you thread the stars of each month. Tulips for April, alliums for May (to cover up the ugly allium leaves you need to plant a perennial with good leaves such as astrantia). Roses will start to flower in June, taking you on to mid-July when dahlias will arrive.
In amongst all this you want to aim for reliable filler plants: Nepeta, salvias, amsonia, alchemilla mollis and stachys, for your front row, salvias, astrantias, knautia or perovskias for your front and middle row, with campanulas, delphiniums, fennel, and thalictrums weaving in and out of veronicastrums and asters.
Remember to use contrasting shapes as well as contrasting textures of the flower heads and leaves. I particularly love Thalictrum 'Elin' which gets very tall, Delphinium 'Faust' and Delphinium 'Elatum'. There is also a wonderful new Veronicastrum called ‘Red Arrows’ that I recommend.
When you choose your plants, try to buy a plant which has AGM (Award of Garden Merit) by its name. This means it has been tried and tested and it thoroughly deserves a place in your garden.
Pictured: A border at Alasdair Cameron's Devon garden, in which grasses and perennials, including Verbena bonariensis, flow around yew domes and taller shrubs.
Containers are the icing on the cake in a garden. They come in all different shapes and sizes, terracotta, stone, wooden, ceramic, basket, zinc and metal. Plant pots tend to be placed quite near the house, so choose materials that suit the style of your house. For smaller containers, group them in threes.
I always try to have a container planted with an evergreen such as Daphne ‘Eternal Fragrance’ for the scent by the door. This can either have a planting of spring bulbs around the outer edge or a permanent planting with hellebores and euphorbias. Another easy permanent planting is Rosemary ‘Miss Jessop's Upright’ or ‘Tuscan Blue’ underplanted with Erigeron karvinskianus.
Spring bulbs are also a great choice for containers; tulips are better in pots than they are in borders because you can lift them easily and grow them again the following year. Tulips and wallflowers look great together and a good combination would be the strong and long lasting pink Tulip 'Menton', Tulip 'Jan Reuss' or 'White triumphator' and Wallflower 'Ruby Gem'. Daffodils and snowdrops signal the start of spring and this year I planted lots of pots with Narcissus 'Thalia' and Leucojum 'Gravetye Giant' which flowered forever.
Once the spring bulbs are finished, it's time to think about summer planting, where I like to organise it around one central plant: Salvia 'Amistad' is everyone’s favourite for this as it grows so well. Around this, I like to go for verbena, felicias, geraniums, cosmos, orlaya and diascias. A good tip is to leave the central plant in the pot but cut the base off, so that the roots of the plant go down, not out. This means that all the other plants will have the space to grow well. Always feed and deadhead your summer pots once a week and you will reap the rewards.
Pictured: Butter Wakefield's London garden
Wigwams of sweet peas, runner beans, climbing courgettes, gourds and rows of onions can be just as beautiful as roses and shrubs. This year in particular, we have all gone mad for growing vegetables so if you have room in your garden, your hard work will be rewarded.
Don't underestimate the hard work, however. If like me, you have little time, then stick with chard, onions, parsley, radishes, lettuce and rocket–all more or less foolproof.
It's usual to grow vegetables in raised beds, which you can buy or build yourself (find out how to build a raised bed), and then arrange in symmetrical groups - four or six work well together.
If you don't have a dedicated vegetable garden you can easily grow plenty of produce and herbs in containers or elsewhere: rosemary and sage work well in borders and thyme is happy growing through paving.
Here are a few basic principles for growing the best vegetables:
Pictured: Raised beds providing abundant vegetables for The Light Bar and Dining restaurant in Johnnie Collins' garden.
I shall never forget walking down a shady path to a friend’s front door and it had just rained, there was this delicious smelling line of lemon-scented lily of the valley wafting upwards, and I just wanted to bottle it. Scent is a crucial element of any garden, so make sure you plan for it.
Roses, wisteria, honeysuckle, Philadelphus 'Belle Etoile', Philadelphus 'Mexican Jewel', Lillium regale, hesperus and calycanthus all smell wonderful and are absolute must haves in any garden. When it comes to roses, 'Mme Alfred Carriere' is one of the best, but if someone asked me to choose one plant for scent, it would be Rosa primula, the incense rose. As you brush past it in the garden, an amazing incense smell floats out to you, but it is the leaves that smell, not the flower. For sheer good looks and scent together, Calycanthus ‘Aphrodite’ I think, has to be one of the most handsome sweet smelling shrubs of all.
Pictured: Umberto Pasti's Moroccan garden
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