A Room With A View.

The view outside is the view you’ll live with for most of the year.

Why the view from inside your house matters when designing a garden.

In the UK, we probably spend more time looking at our gardens than actually sitting in them. It’s something I think about a lot when I’m designing a garden. What will you see through the kitchen window? What catches your eye from the sofa? Where does your gaze naturally land when you look outside? And importantly, what will you be looking at in February, when sitting outside with a glass of something cold feels like a distant memory?

A good garden design shouldn’t only work when you’re actually out in the garden. It should improve the view from inside the house too.

I always start inside the house

When I visit a garden for the first time, I don't immediately head outside. I like to spend some time looking at the garden from inside the house first. The view from the kitchen might be completely different to the one from the sitting room. There might be a fantastic view from a bedroom that the client has never really considered. A window might perfectly frame an existing tree. Or it might perfectly frame next door's wheelie bins.

All of this is useful context.

Windows and doors are essentially frames, so I start thinking about what I want to put inside those frames.

Give your eye somewhere to go

Creating a focal point doesn't necessarily mean plonking a statue or a bench at the end of the garden. It can be much more subtle than that. A well-placed tree, clever planting, a winding path, an unexpected sculpture or even a change in level can draw your eye out into the garden.

One of my favourite tricks is using a tree.

From outside, it should simply look as though it's in exactly the right place in the garden. But its position might also have been carefully chosen because it sits perfectly in the view from the kitchen window. The same principle can be used with a large pot or a particularly beautiful piece of planting. Sometimes we're also trying to distract from something less attractive.

If the main view from your kitchen is currently a shed or the back of someone's extension, hiding it completely isn't always possible. Giving your eye something more interesting to look at in front of it can work just as well.

Your garden has to work in Winter too

It's relatively easy for a garden to look good in June. Everything is growing, perennials are flowering, trees are in leaf. The garden is doing a lot of the hard work for you. Winter is a much better test. This is where evergreen planting, grasses, seed heads, clipped hedging and the structure of trees become really important. Hard landscaping plays a part too. A beautiful path, wall, terrace or set of steps is still there long after the summer planting has disappeared.

And then there's lighting.

Garden lighting isn't just useful when you're outside. In winter, an unlit garden simply disappears when it gets dark. Suddenly that lovely kitchen window you've been looking through all day becomes a big black rectangle. A few carefully positioned lights can pick out the trunk of a tree, illuminate some planting or reveal the shape of the garden. It means you can still enjoy the garden from inside the house at 8pm in December.

Make a small garden feel bigger

Thinking about views can be particularly useful in a smaller garden. If everything interesting happens on the patio immediately outside the house, your eye doesn't have much reason to travel beyond it. I like to create reasons to look further into the garden. A path might disappear behind planting. A tree can sit away from the boundary rather than being pushed right up against the fence. You might just catch a glimpse of another seating area beyond the planting. It creates layers. Instead of looking out and seeing patio, lawn, fence, your eye moves through the space. You don't necessarily need a huge garden to create a sense of depth. Sometimes being a little less obvious about where everything is can actually make a small garden feel considerably bigger.

Look outside

We naturally think about a garden in terms of what we'll do when we're outside in it. Where will we eat? Where will we sit? Where will the barbecue go? But your garden is also the backdrop to everyday life inside your home. It's what you see while making coffee. Washing up. Sitting at the kitchen table. Working from home. Walking down the stairs in the morning. And given the British weather, you'll probably spend rather a lot of time experiencing your garden this way. So when I'm designing a garden, I'm not just thinking about what it will feel like to walk through it. I'm thinking about what you'll see when you look out of the window.

After all, you'll be living with that view through every season of the year, not just summer.

Mark Hardy Design creates characterful residential gardens across Kent, London and the South East.