Complete Garden Design in Oxfordshire

Porcelain (£90–180 per m² installed) is the lowest-maintenance option: dense, frost-proof, does not stain and keeps its colour, and it now comes in convincing stone and timber effects. Indian sandstone (£85–150) is warmer underfoot and cheaper, but it is porous and will need sealing and occasional cleaning. Yorkstone and other natural stone (£130–230) looks the best of the three in an older property and ages beautifully. We bring samples out and lay them down in your garden before you commit.

A patio and lawn is usually one to two weeks. A full redesign with levels, walls, a structure and planting runs four to ten weeks on site. Before any of that there is design and material lead time — porcelain and specific stone can take two to four weeks to arrive. We give you a week-by-week programme with the quote so you know when the garden is unusable and when it is yours again.

We design and build, which means one team is responsible for the drawing and for what actually gets built. We survey the garden, take levels, and produce plans and visuals you can react to before anything is dug. If you already have a designer or an architect we are happy to build to their drawings instead.

This is usually the part that decides the budget. A sloping garden needs either terracing with retaining walls or a graded design that works with the fall. Patios are laid to a fall of roughly 1:80 away from the house, with linear drainage where a threshold sits low. Clay soil, which is common around Oxford, holds water and often needs land drains or soakaways. We take levels at survey stage so this is priced in rather than discovered halfway through.

It depends on how the garden is used. For a shaded, heavily used family garden where real turf turns to mud by November, good artificial grass laid over a proper drainage build-up is a genuine solution and looks convincing now. For a large open garden, or if wildlife and planting matter to you, real turf or a wildflower lawn will always be better. We fit both and will say which we think suits your plot.

Yes. Hard landscaping carries a workmanship guarantee, and manufacturer warranties on materials such as porcelain, composite decking and lighting are passed to you. Planting is guaranteed for the first season provided the watering instructions we leave you are followed — plants need most help in the first summer.

Yes, and it often makes sense. We design the whole garden once, then build it in phases you can budget for — hard landscaping and structures first, planting and lighting later. Designing the whole thing up front is what keeps the phases from fighting each other: drainage, cable routes and foundations all get allowed for in phase one.