Beyond Buildings: The Importance of Thoughtful Garden Design
How our holistic approach to design and architecture has us thinking more about the landscape setting and garden spaces associated with our building projects.
Approach view of our new build family home in the countryside near Bristol.
Studio Four Point Ten: Architects & Garden Designers in Bath and Kent
At Studio Four Point Ten, we are passionate about designing high-quality, sustainable, and meticulously crafted buildings. As architects working in and around Bath and Kent, two regions known for their stunning landscape settings, our expertise extends beyond architecture to include thoughtful landscape design and garden design, ensuring that every project engages with its natural surroundings. We believe that the relationship between a building and its external environment is essential, and our holistic approach to architecture integrates interior spaces with beautifully designed outdoor landscapes. Whether it’s a contemporary home, a heritage restoration, or a rural retreat, we thoughtfully integrate architecture with the surrounding environment to create cohesive and more meaningful spaces. We believe that well-designed landscapes enhance the experience of a home or workplace, adding value, character, and a stronger sense of place.
Every project we undertake considers the relationship between the building and its garden design from the outset. Just as we meticulously plan interiors, we extend our vision outward, ensuring that external spaces are not just an afterthought but an essential part of the overall design. From material selection and planting strategies to access points and framing key vistas, we use landscape design as a tool to enhance natural light, seasonal character, and visual connections between indoor and outdoor spaces.
Our diverse projects, including sustainable beachfront properties in East Sussex, a countryside custom-build near Bristol, and a hilltop house renovation in Bath, all showcase our commitment to embedding buildings into their landscapes. Whether capturing breathtaking views or sculpting light with planting, we ensure that garden design plays a vital role in shaping our architectural concepts.
Some projects have a strong landscape theme built into the design brief from the outset, with many clients seeking out a greater connection with nature and wanting to blur the boundaries between inside and outside. It is not just about wanting their spaces to feel more open and light, or an ability to throw open the patio doors to accommodate the (occasionally) extended dining room table, its about wanting to spend more time outside throughout the year, teaching our children the benefits of exploring the outdoors, seeking more fresh air and finding better ways to live outdoors despite the weather.
Our new house in the countryside surrounding Bath and Bristol was one such project, where the initial concept designs for the house itself, were embedded in ideas around landscape form and character. We even looked to examples of ruinous buildings for lessons in achieving this more seamless integration of building and landscape, order vs chaos, a building being reclaimed! This diagram describes our building as a series of rooms defined in landscape, with walls reaching out through glass to hold key specimen trees, and helping to guide the eye out to find long views of a local landmark glimpsed through a gap in the distant tree line.
Detailed landscape design proposal produced as part of the planning application for a replacement dwelling on a site within the open countryside outside of Thornbury, Bristol. The scheme was for a new family home that was to feel embedded in the landscape and gardens, with a staggered plan form adopted in the architecture as a means to increase its surface area therefore providing more opportunities for double (even triple) aspect views and greater natural lighting.
Breathing New Life into Existing Gardens
More often than not we are working with existing buildings with existing gardens and our clients are looking to reimagine their home as well as their outdoor spaces. The process starts with us developing an understanding of the existing constraints and structures we need to work around and with, and to then explore the opportunities for unlocking the spaces with new lighting strategies, planting schemes and playful additions. We work with sketch plans to explore new character areas and access, develop 3D modelling and sketch views to excite around the drama of a new scene, and then work into the detail of its planting and material treatments to define its identity and texture. On projects that demand a greater level of detail in the planting design we work alongside RHS accredited garden designers to benefit from their experience in the specification of planting, its appropriate placement and its care requirements.
Rear extension and garden transformation for a property in central Bath.
A detailed planting strategy developed at concept design stage for a project to reimagine the spaces of this existing garden stepping down the hillside looking towards the World Heritage City of Bath. Alongside repair works, new material treatments and the reconfiguration of the stepped access between levels, the scheme looked to introduce a new water feature based on the creation of a babbling spring at the top level, running downhill through a set of stone rills, copper chutes, collection ponds and a vertical stone wall cascade feature taking the water back into the ground.
Some projects are about finding a new order and helping to make sense of the spaces left over between buildings. We work to develop a new narrative for how people arrive at the house and what the first impressions are of a site. We set up new routes to explore around the property on your way to discover moments for reflection, for rest or for play, and can help to build a richer sense of journey when moving between areas.
Concept design to reimagine the garden spaces around an extended property in Radstock near Bath.
Designing New Garden Buildings
Some projects require new structures to allow for home working or a new hobby, or for shelter to retreat into the shade. These are welcome opportunities for more playful and inventive side projects, all inherently integral to the garden experience and embedded in the landscape. In these situations we enjoy playing with themes centred around reclaimed ruinous structures, water play, and planting that eventually seeks to envelop the object. We like to use materials that will weather gracefully in time and reflect both the seasonal qualities of a garden as well as the inevitable passing of time and the richness this brings to life. If you are interested to read more around our passion for materials and working with them in architecture, you should click here to read our accompanying article on materials and finishes.
Bespoke designed summer house & studio for a garden in Bath, Somerset. Clad using hit-and-miss timber battens and an internally expressed structural frame.
Some projects focus entirely around placing new structures within emerging or established landscapes, where their purpose for being there is to serve the people who care for and visit these locations. These projects are about making more readily accessible landscapes for all, whilst providing opportunities for expressive and well crafted buildings that speak to our own affinity with working with natural materials and respecting more traditional ways of living and building outside. The below image is taken from our Co-forest project where we are working to support a volunteer based initiate to plant new wooded areas across the south-west of England, with the need for sensitively crafted shelters to store materials and tools, and new bridges to connect between neighbouring sites.
Design of a new pedestrian bridge linking between two new woodland sites being planted as part of the Co-forest initiative, just north of Bristol. The Bridge finds its gap in the hedgerow and spans across the stream with its curved oak walkway.
The Important of Materials and Detailing in Garden Design
Whilst the early stages are fundamental for developing a strong guiding concept for a design (to establish function and embed deeper meaning) the later work seeks to define greater depth of character and soul, through the specific material qualities and well crafted pairings. Much like with our building projects and architecture, we enjoy using natural materials that weather and age gracefully, offering a changing quality to the garden spaces and developing a stronger sense of identity as they age with our buildings. Certain timbers like oak, Larch and Cedar have natural silvering qualities that mature in time while being resilient in use, and raw mild steel undergoes a fascinating phase of change as it oxidises, generating multiple new personalities before finally settling on its inevitable deep brown coat.
The Creative Use of Planting
Planting is arguably one of the most valuable materials we have to play with when working with the space around our buildings, and (at a risk of mixing metaphors) also a tool we use to embed our buildings in a site, to add dynamic seasonal character and add flexibility as something that our clients can take the reins on to explore new themes and colours each season. Sometimes it is as simple case of locating a colourful south facing border to soften the edges of a patio space as the backdrop to family life, or to provide a flourishing scented garden to brush past on the way to the kitchen door. Not all planting has to be so conventional of course, and so even with projects without access to soil we have found ways to place a client’s favourite plant into a scheme, for example using this as inspiration for architectural details and pattern making in the design of furniture, ironmongery or to embellish structural elements of the building itself. Our garden structure project in Bath was one such opportunity to embed planting themes into the very fabric of the structure, as can be viewed here.
Whilst it is often considered that architects only work on designing the outside of a building, here at Studio Four Point Ten we will continue to challenge this convention with our more holistic approach and passion for design. Our ethos not only majors in the interior design of our spaces, but extends to thinking far outside of the box, with the thoughtful shaping of the garden and landscape areas that surround our structures, and that with a little encouragement can even be made to weave their way through into the very fabric of our buildings.
