Shaping the view

Shaping the view The Cart House, near Boddington, Northamptonshire A Modernist garden was exactly the right choice for this newly converted agricultural building

- Tiffany Daneff

THE simplicity of this bold Modernist garden is immediately appealing. It feels so right for the former farm building—the house was converted from a cart house and the next-door cowshed— and, indeed, for the surrounding Northampton- shire countryside with its long, open views. Yet the more one looks, the more it becomes apparent how much thought has gone into its plan. The garden, which covers about 1½ acres including the meadow, was created for the owners, who divide their time between North- amptonshire and London, by Oxford-based designer Angus Thompson. The brief was clear: ‘We wanted a pool, a kitchen garden and plenty of space for the dogs; and we wanted to make the most of the view. The garden also needed to be functional and contemporary, but drift away into the countryside—a light touch, not jarring with the rural outlook.’

It’s this relationship with its setting that is so well done and enables the sharp lines of the pool deck and the gravelled pétanque area to feel entirely at ease with the fields beyond. Grass paths through mown meadow and orchard trees are a familiar way to take the eye (and the garden owners) to the boundary and are certainly at work here. Naturalistic plantings, grasses and meadow play their part, too, but underlying it all is a gratifying geometry of rectangles—the pool, its deck, the pétanque area, the flowerbed—all of the same proportions, each reaching away on the same line from the terrace at the back of the long cart house. These, in turn, are balanced by the shallow stone steps that lead down from the terrace into the garden. It all means that, if you sit on the terrace, you experience a sense of calm, of everything in its right place.