Blog Case study
Most of our work stays within Cheshire and its immediate neighbours, but every so often a project takes us further afield. Crook Lane, Windermere, in the Lake District, was one of those — and a genuinely unusual brief.
The Brief: A Cottage With No Garden At All
The property is an Airbnb cottage set beside open fields, with spectacular surroundings and, until this project, nowhere for guests to actually sit outside and enjoy them. The site itself brought its own challenges: uneven terrain, drainage issues, and the need for a design that would sit comfortably against the natural landscape around it rather than looking imported.
The primary objective was straightforward to state and less straightforward to deliver: give the residents somewhere to sit out. That meant patios, paths, walls, flower beds and a fire pit, built more or less from nothing.
Planning and Design
We began with a detailed consultation to understand what the space needed to do — mainly, hold a group of guests comfortably outdoors with a view worth sitting for. The design settled on a spacious patio for entertaining, tiered garden beds for visual interest across the uneven site, and pathways connecting the different areas of the property so the whole garden worked as one space rather than a collection of separate features.
Excavation and Groundwork
Excavation was carried out carefully to prepare the site for construction, with particular attention to drainage — waterlogging is a common issue on a site like this, and one that’s far cheaper to solve before paving goes down than after. The tiered layout helped here too: breaking a sloping, uneven plot into level sections is as much about managing water as it is about usable space.
What We Built
The finished garden includes a proper patio for entertaining, stone walling and steps to handle the level changes, flower beds bringing colour and structure to the tiered layout, and a fire pit as the natural focal point for evenings outdoors — exactly the kind of feature that turns “a garden” into somewhere guests actually want to spend their evening.
What Building Further Afield Actually Involves
Taking on a project outside our usual Cheshire radius means the planning stage has to work harder before anyone sets foot on site — understanding the local terrain, the weather a Lake District garden actually experiences compared with Cheshire’s clay-and-rain pattern, and coordinating material deliveries and site visits over a greater distance than usual. It’s worth doing for the right project, and Crook Lane was exactly that: a genuinely unusual brief, a spectacular setting, and a client who needed the same fundamentals — proper drainage, a well-built sub-base, planting suited to the actual site — that every garden needs, wherever it happens to be.
The Result
A cottage that had nothing outdoors beyond an adjacent field now has a proper garden built specifically for the setting it sits in — somewhere guests can sit out and take in the Lake District views the property is there for in the first place. It’s a reminder that “no garden” is a genuinely fixable starting point, whatever the terrain looks like at the outset.
Designing for Guests Rather Than Owners
A garden built for an Airbnb carries a different brief to a family garden, even when the finished features look similar. It has to work for people who’ve never seen the space before and won’t get a settling-in period to learn its quirks — clear sightlines to the view, seating that reads as inviting in a photograph as well as in person, and planting robust enough to handle changeover after changeover without a resident gardener keeping on top of it week to week. Those considerations shaped the layout at Crook Lane as much as the terrain did, and they’re worth thinking about for any garden that has to work hard for people who are only passing through.
Building a Garden From Scratch?
Whether your plot is a Cheshire new-build or, like this one, somewhere a little further afield, we manage the whole process from design through groundworks to the finished garden. See our full garden makeover page for how we approach a blank canvas, or get in touch to talk through your own project.
