Hotel Italianate-style Garden, Stockbridge, Hampshire, UK

Hotel Italianate-style garden with water features, topiary, archways, stone paving and balustrades, Stockbridge, Hampshire, UK

A great opportunity to design an Italianate-style garden for a leading hotel in Hampshire. Marble paving and stone balustrades covered with metal archways festooned with roses and evergreen climbers. Topiary plays a big part in this design, from circular box hedging to large topiarized spirals and pyramid-shaped orange trees. The pathways link this external space to the architecture of the hotel. Visitors and guests can make their way from the main reception to other parts of the hotel. Climbing and shrub roses provide shape, texture and scent throughout the summer. A main circular water feature basin, with small mosaic tiles and a central octagonal water spout, is surrounded by a low box hedge, defining the space.

In a small area of this hotel  is a small seating area with a stone wall and a mask water spout that fills a stone trough below. The water features are audible throughout the entire garden. Orange trees are brought out of the greenhouse every summer in large pale stone, decorative vase-shaped urns. Seasonal bedding planted underneath the orange trees adds a shot of colour.

Formality

This hotel Italianate-style garden is a formal garden with strong bold lines, wide pathways and laid out with box hedges, gently flowing fountains, and classical sculptures. Symmetry plays a big part in this style of garden for pure visual pleasure. Balance and symmetry in design and planting are key to creating the feeling of ‘manmade order’. The  garden’s boundaries were determined, ‘borrowing’ the surrounding landscape for maximum visual impact, and yet the garden is completely separate from it.

The main axes divide the garden and encourage the guests to a particular vista. Evergreen structure holds the framework of the garden together during winter and are used extensively to screen, give height, create depth and add vertical layers.

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