Location: Irving Road, Toorak
Client: Private
Scope: Landscape, pool
Completed: 2006

Simple combinations and aged textures allowed this stunning Toorak project to maintain a soul. In creating a modern urban garden over a large basement at the front of the property and a pool relocation and landscape to the rear, we layered hard and soft landscape components with restrained but focused detail to provide balance and flow. Details include the repeated use of intricately aligned sawn blue stone in lawn and groundcover as detail and a transition. Pebbles laid on end in horizontal and vertical lines dissect the sawn blue stone paving and lawn, while mirror ponds extend the entire northern boundary.

Allowing the tendrils of our planting scheme to slightly blur the lines between hard and soft complimented the wonderfully weathered Victorian Bluestone. Oak leafed hydrangeas, magnolias, fescues and lawn collected proportionally with soft paving and patinated concrete walls provided a textured moment in this Toorak landscape that moves with the seasons. 

When any landscape ages, plants mature and grow into themselves and their spaces. Yet equally gratifying is when we return to a project many years after its installation to see the leeching and patina on walls, the intentionally distressed appearance to structures that provide the landscape a sense of age and sophistication – a sense that this could be ‘anywhere’. These moments are only achievable with time.

Photography: Earl Carter Studio