Nield Avenue, Balgowlah

29 Jan

2024 Landscape Excellence Awards - Gold and Best in Category

Nield Avenue sat on a steep, uneven slope, bumpy and effectively unusable. There was nowhere for the kids to play, nowhere to sit, and the walk from the street to the front door felt like an obstacle rather than an arrival. The homeowners had a landscape design by Jamie King, a strong vision on paper that needed serious structural work to stand up on the ground. We built it in two stages.

Stage one: the front garden

In 2022, the brief started with the basics: a level lawn the kids could actually play on. Retaining walls resolved the slope, and a terraced garden bed along the wall softened the drop rather than leaving it bare. The entry was the other priority. Feature concrete steps now lead up from the footpath, past a dragon tree planted for the arrival, to the front door. Advanced plants gave the beds an established feel from day one, and irrigation means none of it depends on someone remembering to water.

Stage two: the back garden

A year later, the clients asked us back. The rear was the harder site: a steep slope, damaged by earlier construction and heavy rain, that nobody could use. The brief was to tie it into the front garden and give it a sense of fun.

The garden now runs down the hill as a sequence of levels. Hardwood steps float down one side, each tread offset from the next and broken by concrete landings, so the walk from the house to the garden and pool is an experience in itself. At the centre is a level lawn framed by white rendered walls, with a timber bench built into the back wall, facing the lawn. Above it, the pool terrace.

The back garden went on to win Gold and Best in Category for Residential Construction at the 2024 Landscape Excellence Awards. As written up in the Landscape Contractor here.

A slope nobody used is now a garden the family lives in, front and back. That’s what we built.

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