PROJECT

Suffolk Walled Garden

DESIGN

Colm Joseph Gardens

CONTRACTOR

Stewart Landscape Construction Limited

CLAY PAVER

SeptimA Colosseum

Photo's: Richard Bloom

Colm Joseph Gardens is an award-winning landscape company from England, based near Cambridge. In the east of County Suffolk, they transformed a historic enclosed garden of a modern home into an imaginative and natural park environment, inspired by the site's heritage and local landscape. The design was nominated for the Vande Moortel Clay Paver Award 2022-2023 and won the People's Choice Award at the SGD Awards 2025.

Interconnected garden rooms

The walled garden was once part of an ancient estate. In recent years, it had been reduced to a neglected, uninspiring outdoor space with empty stretches of lawn and paving. After the construction of a modern house on the site, the garden around it also needed to be tackled again. “Our design vision was to create an imaginative, bold and naturalistic garden that is harmonious with the modern architecture, the traditional walled garden, and the wider landscape” – Colm Joseph states. “The aim was to create bespoke outdoor living spaces that felt immersed within beautiful planting, where the overall feeling was soft and natural”.  Colm Joseph Gardens created a compelling set of green outdoor rooms connected by meandering gravel paths. Native and biodiverse planting interacts with sustainable paving such as limestone chippings and clay pavers.

From flower meadow to kitchen garden

The front garden consists of a minimalist composition of pruned beech and ornamental grasses that refer to the reed beds along the nearby estuary. The space then flows into a lush gravel garden surrounded by local plantings such as birch, dwarf pine and grasses. The birches give height to the garden and subtly demarcate the rooms. At the same time, they frame the whole and offer filtered views of the rest of the greenery. A path then leads via a wildflower meadow to a kitchen garden where residents can grow their own fresh produce. A rainwater harvesting system is also present there for the sustainable reuse of rainwater in the vegetable garden.

Clay pavers unite modernity, heritage and tradition

For the hard materials, a minimalist palette was chosen, consisting of clay pavers, limestone gravel and timber. The designer emphasizes that this ties in with both the old walls and the modern architecture to create a unified, harmonious feel. Several terraces and seating areas are integrated among the greenery, laid with SeptimA clay pavers in the colour Colosseum. The grey paving not only symbolises Suffolk's traditional building heritage, but also refers to the old brick walls on the site. They deliberately chose to create a contrast between the colour of the pavers and the red brick of the walls. To achieve a more modern effect, the clay pavers were applied in a stacked bond, a reference to the clean, rectilinear architecture of the house.

“We chose to lay the pavers in a stack bond to give a more modern feel in contrast to the traditional brick wall. In this way, the clay pavers help to harmonise the garden with both the traditional old brick wall, while still resonating with the modernity of the house architecture.” – Colm Joseph

The result looks simple and soothing, with an exceptional sense of detailing, beautifully balancing old and new, hard and soft.