Grounds
The terrace nobody sits on
Four fixable reasons the most expensive part of the garden stays empty.
Under the sky
Grounds
The garden is the room you use least and photograph most. Grounds is about closing that gap: shade you can sit in at two, a pool that looks right empty, planting that takes a dry August without a crisis.
Grounds
Grounds
The pool you look at
You swim in it for six weeks and look at it for fifty-two. Design it for the looking.
Grounds
The garden that survives August
A Mediterranean garden that needs daily water is not a garden. It is an installation with a subscription.
The short version
A terrace is a room with the ceiling missing
Outdoor spaces fail for indoor reasons. They are too big, too exposed, too far from the kitchen, or they have no back. A terrace with open sky on four sides is a platform, not a place to sit, which is why people drift back inside twenty minutes after the aperitif.
Fix the back first: a wall, a hedge, a pergola with real depth. Then fix the shade, and fix it for the hours you will use it, which in most of Europe means the west side needs more protection than the south. Then get the distance to the kitchen under fifteen paces, because that number decides whether you eat outside on a Wednesday or only when there are guests.
The pool comes last in the thinking and first in the budget, which is the wrong way round. A pool is a large blue rectangle that you look at for eleven months and swim in for one.
Worth knowing
Terrace depth that takes a dining table and a chair pulled back
3.6 m minimum
Distance kitchen to outdoor table that people actually use
under 15 paces
Pool running cost, 8 by 4 m, heated season
2,400 to 4,500 euro a year in southern Europe
Pergola beam spacing for usable midday shade
30 to 40 per cent of the span left open
The house vote
The garden has room for one of these. Which?
Use it now
Running Costs
What a house in the sun costs every year once it is finished.
Questions people ask
If you like the look of dark water and can accept a fortnight of algae in high summer, yes. The maintenance is not lower than a chlorinated pool, it is different: less chemistry, more gardening.
Olive, rosemary, lavender, cistus, phlomis, agave, oleander, cypress. What kills a second home garden is not drought but irrigation that fails while nobody is watching.
Far less than is usually installed. Three or four pools of low light at path level and one uplit tree beat a run of bollards, and the dark between them is the point.
Stone if it is in permanent shade or gets pool water, deck if it is warm underfoot and drains, gravel where you want the sound. Never composite where the sun hits it at 40 degrees.
The Saturday letter
One letter a week, on a Saturday.
One letter a week: the new long read, one room worth studying, one number worth knowing. No advertising, no tracking, one click to leave.