When it comes to selling new homes...

By David Hoppit
Posted: 2008/10/10

WHAT great times we live in. Houses are cheap today - well, cheaper than they were yesterday and looking set to become even more affordable as the global credit crisis continues to bite.

House builders are doing all they can to keep their businesses alive but, like the banks, they are struggling to maintain any momentum. It is a situation that the more senior among us have seen all too often before.

To stand any chance of survival in this market the house builder has to pull out all the stops to make his product better than that of his rivals, which is good news for buyers. Nowhere is this more visible than in the gardens that frame most new homes today.

However beautiful it is within, a new home surrounded by poorly planned gardens - or no garden at all - would be like exhibiting the Mona Lisa with a plastic frame.

The New Homes Garden Awards promote excellence in garden and landscape design while, at the same time, encouraging greater awareness of sustainability and environmental issues.

The awards, now in their fifth year and supported once again by Express Newspapers, NHBC, Landscape Institute and the New Homes Marketing Board have become one of the most important competitions in the industry, hotly contested by most major builders and, refreshingly, by many smaller specialists as well.

Furthermore it's not just house builders who are challenging. Among the 22 categories are several for landscape architects and garden designers, with entries from the likes of Gardener's World presenter Joe Swift. This year his design company, Modular Garden, won no fewer than three gold medals including Garden of the Year - and this was a year in which gold was in short supply.

Joe didn't have things all to himself however, with specialist designers of the calibre of Andrew Fisher Tomlin, TC Landscapes, David Keegan, Mary Bullock and others adding to the judges' often dif. cult decision-making.

The distinguished panel of judges spent a very full day sifting through a mountain of entries, debating and sometimes having what diplomats call 'full and frank discussion'.

The awards have evolved a fair system of scoring by which each judge's score is fed into a computer. As with the Chelsea Flower Show there is no attempt at placings (1st, 2nd and 3rd) but rather awards of excellence with medals of different colours - and sometimes no medals at all.

Only those entries achieving a minimum score qualify for an award of any kind (silver, silver gilt and gold). As the years pass and the standards rise the scoring becomes tougher, so to win metal of any colour requires tremendous effort. This year's 'league table' totalled 12 gold medals, nine silver gilt and 22 silver.

As usual some of the most hotly contested categories were those for retirement developments, with Sunrise Senior Living again triumphing, with two gold medals in the luxury sector (one in Weybridge and another in Wolverhampton).
In the volume sector McCarthy & Stone and Churchill Retirement Living scooped silver gilt medals, the former with its developments in Thirsk and Worthing and the latter in Bognor Regis.

For McCarthy & Stone there was evidence of a huge push for better (and greener) landscaping, the . rm also triumphing with a Gold for its Ludlow entry in the category for the best landscaped brown . eld development.

The . rm was also awarded silver in the House Builder of the Year category.

Another household name demonstrating massive improvements in the world of gardens and landscaping was Barratt, whose West London division shared with St George West London the accolade for Landscape of the Year, both gaining well earned gold medals for their efforts.

Barratt also triumphed with a gold in the Best Communal Garden category, its gardens, with dramatic water fall and neatly clipped yew hedging, at Allingham Court, in Bishop's Avenue, Hampstead, deemed to be the best of the entries. This is where the most expensive . ats ever built by the . rm (one over £10 million) were recently brought on to the market.

Among the outstanding entries in the category for best landscaped brown . eld development was Persimmon's Riverside, at Stroud, which earned a silver gilt.

Explore Living won a silver for their restoration of a landscape resembling the bow of the great ocean liner Queen Mary at their art deco Grand Ocean Hotel development in Saltdean. Overall the design and build budgets for this year's entries were shown to have increased considerably with this particular project allocated over £150,000.

Higgins Homes, from Essex, replaced a former garage in Woodford Green with a mixed development of retail with 24 . ats above. To compensate for the lack of garden space the . rm employed Mark Cooper Associates to provide a roof garden nearly 150 feet long for the enjoyment of all the residents. The judges felt that good though the design was it could have bene. ted with even more planting, but it was a worthy silver medal winner.

There was also an encouraging . urry of entries in the best environmental garden section, with two entries proving particularly outstanding. Acorn won a gold, edging out Rosemullion Homes (silver gilt), whose house in Cornwall won huge praise for its environmental awareness.

Before and after

Some of the most interesting categories brought together designers of the present with those of the past. In some cases the gardens as well as the buildings had been listed by English Heritage and this presented even greater challenges to those charged with the care and restoration.

In one case Nicholas King Homes was converting a listed 1960s college in St Albans into 40 . ats and the gardens, which included areas of concrete that had also been listed, had to be incorporated. The . rm employed TC Landscapes who cleverly kept the concrete but provided a superb garden above it.

One of the most challenging restorations under way this year was at Queen Mary's Place, Roehampton, at a mansion that had been used as a hospital for much of the 20th Century. The institutional use meant that much of the garden designed by Lutyens and Jekyll had been sacri. ced to car parking and buildings.

The builder St James, a division of the Berkeley Group, employed specialists in historic landscapes to start the huge job of restoring and later rebuilding the gardens as close as possible to Lutyens' original concept. The . rst phase involved restoration of the sunken garden at the side of the mansion. This necessitated the . xing of a grill (for health and safety reasons! ) just below the surface of the formal pond.
Also for safety reasons the entire garden had to be scanned for unexploded bombs, for the area was much attacked during the war.
Three bold fountains now give life to the formal pond, but judges debated long and hard about the need for them. Purists felt the water feature should have been restored to Lutyens original concept, while others thought they were a refreshing addition.

Such is the case with awards judging. It's called constructive con. ict - and long may it prosper!

Come into the garden Flo, where the leeks and the artichokes grow.
A show house garden planted with vegetables, fruit and fragrant traditional . Borrowers vying for prominence proved to be one of the most popular innovations of the competition. It was designed with old time values, thrift and family in mind, inspired by a cottage garden in an English village.

Gertrude Jekyll, the myopic garden designer who teamed up with Sir Edwin Lutyens a century ago, was also inspired by her perception of a cottage garden, but this entry, by Environ Country Homes, is probably a good deal closer to the real thing that any of Miss Jekyll's masterpieces.

Occupants of real cottages would have grown their own vegetables, fed scraps to a few hens and possibly even had a beehive or two. In designing the garden around The Ashurst at Oaks Hamlet, in Kent, designer Julie Johnson of Forget-me-Not Landscape Design captured the magic of the gardens of our ancestors.

Traditional country elements were built in to the garden, with rain water butts, Kentish hop poles used as retainers and picket fences providing privacy. Oldfashioned plants were used to provide fragrance and seed heads, to encourage bird and insect life.

Excellent though it was the Environ garden was pipped for top honours by Croudace Homes, with a spectacular corner plot at its Spectrum development in Stevenage that produced a well-earned gold for the Surrey-based