Set in one of those extraordinary corners of London – and there are quite a few of them – where the mood, light, architecture, noise and even the smells change abruptly as you turn from one street into another, is a magnificent secret garden.
It is near a major roundabout, with routes taking you on to two major motorways, including the main road to London’s Heathrow airport, one of those junctions that boasts a permanent queue of traffic in all directions.
A tall building separating the house from the main road provides a solid noise barrier and shelter from the north and west. Stand in the enclosed back garden and all you can hear is birdsong.
The house is late 17th/early 18th century, flat fronted, with the sort of proportions that make those of us who live in properties of a much later date deeply envious.
The design of the outdoor space complements these proportions, with the main axis following a line that runs right through the house.
Homeware impresario Cath Kidston and her husband, the record producer Hugh Padgham, bought the property in 2001.
They have since moved on, putting the house up for sale for £5.5 million in 2017, but the garden they conceived with designer Brita von Schoenaich, is a masterclass in creating an outside space to complement your interiors, as well as working with challenging urban plots.
It took six years for the couple to tackle the garden, at the same time as they embarked on a kitchen extension.
Kidston wanted the garden to echo the contemporary style of the kitchen: “It is a luxury to have open space in London, and I was after something quite simple and airy,” she says.
The property actually comprises three separate outdoor spaces: a back garden, a front garden and a river garden, which is across the road from the house, on the banks of the Thames.
The back garden has its advantages – a lovely old 18th-century wall, for example – but it also has its challenges, the biggest of which is the fact that the lawn is not level, but slopes from side to side.
Von Schoenaich’s ingenious solution was to install paving set out in a pattern that looks a bit like a bar chart, with slabs of different lengths extending into the lawn, parallel to the terrace.
The kitchen floor was laid with the same stone as the terrace, which makes the latter appear larger by blurring the dividing line between inside and out.
Opposite the extension is an enormous London plane (Platanus × hispanica), where von Schoenaich installed an egg-shaped wooden seat around its trunk, and beyond the terrace, slabs of uniform length create a path to the bottom of the garden.
This area is divided from the lawn by a rectangular canal that runs across the entire width. A short box hedge and taller beech hedge help to screen the view into this section from the house.
Where the path crosses the pool, there is another inventive bit of design: the canal is in two parts, with a shallow end suitable for paddling, and a longer deeper end.
These “bar chart” slabs fool the eye so completely that you are not aware of the slope in the lawn until you get to the end of the garden and look back. To see how the axis through the garden works, however, you have to go up to the main bedroom and look down.
From here, you can see that the path in the back garden lines up with the path in the front garden, which also lines up with the entrance to the river garden.
“I like order and symmetry,” Kidston explains, which may seem a surprising comment from a woman known for florals.
Flowers are at the heart of the fashion and textile empire she created, which she sold in 2015. She has since set up a bath and body care brand called C. Atherley which is inspired by scented leaf geraniums (pelargoniums).
Despite this, the only really flowery bit of her former back garden was not so much a border as a “jungly path”, with, in spring, a mass of dark tulips, before a cottage-garden mixture of foxgloves, irises, euphorbia, rock roses and fennel flower.
Honeysuckle and jasmine scramble up the old brick wall and in among the paving are clumps of Alchemilla mollis.
Beyond the canal a small orchard was planted with quince, apple and cherry trees, with a little greenhouse bursting with pelargoniums tucked away at the back. This area also includes a vegetable patch alongside a small cutting garden full of dahlias, which Kidston used to decorate the house.
A privet hedge screens the river garden from the road and forms an arch around the gate.
The river garden floods regularly – two or three times a month at high tide – but although this has left a tidemark along the base of the privet, the hedge doesn’t seem to suffer at all.
It is a perfect hedging plant for town and city gardens. It will grow in sun or shade, it shrugs off pollution and it’s tolerant of bad pruning, because it regrows from old wood.
Apart from the hedge, the river garden was mainly laid to lawn, with a damp-loving willow tree and roses and Philadelphus at the drier end nearest the road.
Grass, of course, is tolerant of flooding and even brackish water, as long as it does not remain submerged for long periods.
The seat hanging from the willow tree provides the perfect vantage point to watch the river traffic, which on this section of the water is mainly comprised of leisure craft and rowing eights – there are dozens of rowing clubs based along this stretch of the Thames.
The garden is also on the route of the annual Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge.
Set between road and race route, it is an elegant garden that radiates calm in the middle of a busy world.
The Secret Gardeners by Victoria Summerley and Hugo Rittson Thomas (updated edition), £35 Frances Lincoln
© The Standard Ltd