The Cheeran House – RIBA Award Winning Home and Garden

Design, specification and installation started with on-site consultancy work. The Cheerans had ambitions to see the house entered for a RIBA Architectural Award and an important element of this was to have a landscape fully integrated with the house. The design was simple but effective. We used just two contrasting mixes (Golden Summer and Purple Haze) pre grown as meadow mats and laid in large sweeping areas to cover the bulk of the garden area. Access and viewpoints were created with lovely wide mown paths sweeping through and connecting different sections of the outdoor spaces. Laid in the winter of 2014 the meadows leapt into early colour in spring 2015 and provided successional colour right up to the end of the year. The mown grass areas themselves are managed by a small robotic grass cutter controlled by sensors along the meadow border. A couple of seasonal maintenance visits to check any invading undesirable weeds and a final end of season cut in February 2016 has been the extent of the meadow management and fulfilled the additional element of brief for very low maintenance.