This country garden in Sussex includes the largest summerhouse we've ever incorporated in a design, requiring planning and building regs for the complex construction. The new swimming pool is thirteen metres by five metres, with an automatic cover, allowing scale and proportion for both the building and the long terrace. From the outset, we brought in mature Liquidambar trees to give the garden - previously just a large empty lawn - a sense of longevity. The tall pyramid Carpinus came from Griffin Nurseries, along with the mature flowering cherry outside the summerhouse. Planting the wide borders with a combination of structural and herbaceous plants has provided the garden with a blowsy romantic feel where roses, nepeta and lavender soften the straighter lines of the landscaping. The summerhouse is used for entertaining, with a gym, changing and showering area. The ceiling is vaulted and the door and window details link back to the orangery of the main house.

The brick wall was built to a bespoke design, including missing brick spaces to avoid the feeling of being enclosed whilst the open metal gates give glimpses to the front of the house. The larger gate came from Dortons reclamation and John, at Reddick Forge, copied it exactly for the smaller version.

The client had seen an oak pergola at a hotel in the New Forest, so we constructed a similar oak structure leading from the house to the tennis court. The path is laid in brick pavers - which also run across the terrace in lines to break up the paving. Concrete drain squares have been inserted into the path and planted up with Erigeron daisies to soften the hard landscaping. The bricks and pavers were especially chosen to link back to the bricks of the house and they're used in the Summerhouse construction too.

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