Featured in The Daily Telegraph’s Home section in March 2019, our Surry Hills courtyard shows how much a small, hemmed-in space can deliver with the right design. Writing for the paper, Robyn Willis called it “punching above its weight.”
The courtyard was just 8m by 8m, boxed in by five-metre walls on all three sides, with no access except through the living room. We stripped it right back, taking out the old pavers to start from a clean canvas, then divided the space into two subtly different zones: stone paving for a lounge area on one side and a smooth concrete slab for the dining table on the other.
The hero is the old sandstone wall, once the side of a neighbouring warehouse. It had heaps of character, and we could see it would light up beautifully at night, so rather than leave three plain walls that might have felt like a prison yard, we made that heritage stone the courtyard’s feature, uplit to glow after dark.
It is proof that a compact, awkward site is no barrier to a garden that feels generous and considered.
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