Property

Times : Property

August 29, 2004

Bringing the outdoors inside

Top florist Stephen Woodhams opened up his south London flat to add more daylight — and more of the garden too, reports Simon Brooke of The Sunday Times

If the garden really is an outside room, as designers and developers keep telling us, there could be few better examples of how to put this theory into practice than at Stephen Woodhams’ London flat. The floral designer’s skilful blurring of the distinction between house and outside space is apparent as soon as you walk through the front door.

The hallway, like the kitchen and dining area, is paved with flagstones, which lead out through a sleek modern conservatory into the garden. “I made sure the line of grouting between the flagstones carried straight down the hall into the kitchen to make the flat look bigger,” explains Woodhams. Certainly, when you enter the house this concrete seam appears to carry on for ever as it leads through the hallway and out towards the garden.

Woodhams, whose clients include the actress Gillian Anderson and the fashion designer Joseph Ettedgui, moved from Portobello Road to this ground-floor, two-bedroom flat in a Victorian terrace in Kennington, south London, five years ago. Immediately he determined to open it up, not only to bring as much light in as possible — but as much garden, too.

To achieve this, the back wall of his flat was removed to make space for a glass conservatory, which opens onto the garden. Light now pours into the combined kitchen, living room and dining area. The windows are almost permanently open and even during the worst of a miserable British summer, Woodhams appreciates this semi-outdoor space. “There is nothing better than curling up on the settee with a cup of coffee and the papers while the rain beats down on the glass above you,” he says.

Subtle use of colour has also helped bring the garden into the home, and vice versa. “I’ve enjoyed working with different colour palettes,” says Woodhams. Internally the walls are painted a soft mushroom shade from heritage paint supplier Farrow & Ball; the colour matches the render on the outside walls and has, in turn, been used on the supporting pillars inside the house.

The conservatory frame was originally white. “It looked tacky, so I had it painted battleship grey to match the colour scheme.”

The side wall of the flat was removed and the existing kitchen ripped out. The room was then extended sideways into an alleyway along the side of the building, following delicate negotiations over the party wall with the adjoining property. There is now a galley-style kitchen here with dark wood units and pale grey composite stone surfaces.

“We put frosted glass along the roof so that you get natural light coming in, but there is still a bit of privacy,” explains Woodhams. At the opposite end of the room, a specially commissioned dark wood storage unit hides the boiler.

Woodhams kept a keen eye on the budget and the whole project cost less than £15,000. Even the ubiquitous flagstones were a bargain at £2 each, he explains triumphantly.

However, disaster nearly struck when the builders removed the rear wall. “We discovered that there was no proper foundation for a lot of the back of the house, so at 4.30pm on a Friday afternoon I was desperately ringing round trying to get some scaffolding organised to underpin it,” he explains. As a result, the building took nearly a year to complete.

Woodhams’ garden is simple with strong, clean lines, which echo the interior of the house. A strong industrial element is created mainly by five giant tubs containing copper beeches, which dominate the garden. They represent two particular Woodhams quirks — oversizing and odd numbers.

“Objects arranged in threes, fives or sevens look more striking and interesting than when they come in even numbers,” he explains. “I also love over- and undersizing. For instance, at One Aldwych (the London boutique hotel), we used huge tubs containing tiny box hedge.”

The inclusion of the planting tubs in the garden was a happy coincidence. They are made from enormous concrete rings that are usually put together by builders to form drainage pipes. “I saw them stacked up in a storage depot as I was driving around the M25,” says Woodhams. “When I ordered them the delivery guy couldn’t believe they were going to a flat, not a building site — he was convinced he’d got the wrong address.”

Around the base of these monsters are pink neon lights that are practical at night and provide a colourful contrast with the monolithic grey concrete. The garden table is painted shocking pink and the pink neon theme is picked up in the kitchen lighting inside.

The garden’s no-nonsense industrial look is softened with shrubs and also with the inclusion of a simple water feature that runs along the back of the house and conservatory and is crossed by stepping-stone flagstones. The water flows gently over mossy pebbles and tiny water boatmen hop about over the surface. This image is repeated in the bathroom, where a stainless-steel industrial bathtub is suspended above a mass of pebbles. Surprisingly, there are few flowers in the garden. The colour scheme is simple with copper-leaved trees and deep-green box hedges. The giant Sorbus tree that overlooks the garden was inherited but fits into the palette with its bright orange berries.

Like the apocryphal plumber who was too busy working on his clients’ pipes to stop his own tap from dripping, Woodhams gets little time to devote to his garden, and he designed it to take this into account. “It’s not really low-maintenance,” he laughs, surveying it from his sofa in the glass atrium. “It’s more like no-maintenance.”

Stephen Woodhams’ gardening tips:

“Grasses are really big at the moment,” he says. They look dramatic but need little attention. “Choose something like Stipa gigantea, which has beautiful bronze seed heads, and Macleaya cordata with its elegant silvery leaves.”

Gardeners are becoming more “green” these days. “Ecological choices for planting include evergreens and shrubs that are drought-resistant,” he suggests.

“Tweak your garden every now and then rather than changing the whole thing. Paint the walls or change the odd plant on a regular basis.”

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