Entry Garden | Design Desk Session 1

Take a look behind the scenes at a project on my design desk. In this video, I explore two different design solutions to a real life problem, each with its various pros and cons.

Let me know if you have specific questions, and I will do my best to answer. The point of this exercise early in the design concept development is to choose a general direction from which to work out details later on.

Welcome back to Garden Studio I’m Tessa Pinner a designer and Gardener in upstate South Carolina Zone 8A thought it would be fun today to do a little bit different kind of show one that is more A View From what’s on my design desk rather than what’s going on in my

Garden today’s project is very early on in the concept phase we are looking at arrangement of elements on site and that is one of my favorite things to do thinking about the experience that someone is going to have from the start of their driving onto the

Site where they Park how they come to the front door the whole sequence of approach that determines their first impressions and how they feel when they arrive let’s dive in this residence is on a private Lake and the house is oriented towards the lake but all visitors come in essentially the back so

What I’m thinking through today is how to make that experience really Pleasant for them the owners you can see are going to be parking here but we have a couple of different options for where we can have the guests Park there’s room for two cars in the covered carport and

They have this as a backout option however they would like to be able to fit at least three more cars for guests so we are re-evaluating This this option here gives space for three more cars and this was the owner’s initial idea when I arrived on site this week have the cars come pretty much right to the front door and I said well we could do that as long as we give this right here that I’m

Shading is planted bed space and this is planted bed space 10 foot worth that would be just enough to give you a buffer to pull cars there are really no windows with a view this way so that wouldn’t be a big deal a tree here a tree here and this is

The option for backup and pull out this would work with the slope of the site we are going to need a retaining wall in here because it slopes like this right now down to the front door here’s front door and we are trying to carve out a flat

Spot here’s the wall that would be required to hold back the Earth so this is an option it would be maybe the most efficient quickest way to the front door but this retaining wall is going to cost some money the second option that we discussed was to leave owner parking down

Here and have guests Park up near the road so this makes it convenient for the owner still we can leave this General outline for the drive but the guest can simply pull off up here this is the existing roadway here so our challenge is giving enough for three cars one 2 three

This means we have to mess with the grade of the Hill as little as possible we actually save ourselves from needing a big retaining wall this way these people can use the real estate of the road that already exists as they’re spot to back up and

Now we have an opportunity to do some really nice plantings in here we could do some nice big trees up here that flank the owner’s entrance some big Evergreens that make it feel like you’ve really arrived here we can give these cars a screen and one fun thing we talked about

Was to make an arrival sequence that comes from these cars and Loops down towards the front door so that these guests which don’t necessarily need to be all the way up here and they could drop somebody off here if they needed to get to walk through a garden

On the way to the front door and the owners have saved a lot of money on retaining So you can see here I did a couple of versions of the path took me a minute to get an angle that I liked and I’m looking at the Contour of the land as well and trying to work with that along with what is going to make sense for

These cars coming down but the idea with this one is there would only be a small retaining wall if any and these people who are occasional visitors would get to walk down from their parking spot through a garden environment down a beautiful path through trees through an entry little

Plaza the family has a couple of antique Mills that have been in the family for generations and they want to use something in the garden it would give a spot for that there could be some planters out here definitely wouldn’t have to this could be a spot for a bench or two

Benches to have a little seat in the trees again the main attraction is out here this is the lake so most of the lounging sitting is going to be with a view out this way way however that entry arrival sequence for the guest is something that

Could be truly special and I think this could be both a solution to save money and make that experience more unique also in this version you can see I reversed the backout area over here and it solved a lot of problems for me that I was running into with having that push

Into the garden and the path area so this is also a relatively flat piece over here we won’t be losing much to have them do that it just makes this all work a lot better it can be pretty confusing to look at things just in plan view my next

Step for these clients is going to be to just do a perspective sketch of how both of these would feel with the front of the house This is a front view of option one here are the guest car spots sometimes this would be an empty pvel parking court and the owner Park here you can see how that would feel of course it was really in perspective the cars would be up here actually blocking

Some of the view of the house but it works it’s a nice solution and a great op option if that’s the direction they want to go I’ll skip the process of drawing the second option here and go right to the finished result it’s a little bit hard to see with layers of

Trees here but this gives you a very general feel of be winding through this Garden environment there’d be layers of trees that you would be walking through before finally approaching that entry Plaza with a millstone inside set before arriving to the front door this final image is the two options side by side

Now these aren’t incredibly polished drawings by any means they just took a few minutes each to do and this is on the level of what I would do for a client I showed the client these pictures and walked them through pretty much this exact same reasoning and I’m

Not sure what they’re going to choose but this was enough to give them the feel of each of these two different options you can clearly see the differences between the two and some of the ramifications just by a quick 10minute sketch for each of these options this was a different kind of

Video today if you are designing something for yourself or you’re interested in design I hope this was helpful just to give you a window into my thought process and how I would approach a design problem like this one I hope you all have a great Week