Choosing who designs and builds your garden is a bigger decision than choosing the design itself. The scheme can be changed on paper; the company builds what you will live with for decades. After twenty-six years of designing and building gardens — and, in fairness, of being called in to repair a good number that other people built — here is what we would look for.
One company for the drawing and the ground. The most expensive gardens we have ever been asked to rescue were drawn by one company and built by another, with neither answerable for the joint. When the designer also builds, the steps are drawn the way they will be built, the drainage is designed before the paving is chosen, and there is one company to hold to the finished garden. Ask directly: do you build what you draw?
Evidence, not adjectives. 'Award winning' is everywhere and 'bespoke' means nothing. Ask to walk a finished garden — not a portfolio photo, a garden, three winters in — and ask the owner what the company was like when it rained for a fortnight. Any studio worth hiring will have clients who will show you around. We do it regularly, from Bishop's Stortford to Cambridge.
Clarity about money, twice over. At design stage: a fixed fee, quoted before drawing begins, for work described stage by stage — see our honest design cost ranges. At build stage: a specification detailed enough to price, a programme with dates, staged payments tied to completed work, and a quote that includes VAT rather than discovering it at invoice. Vague numbers at quote stage become variations later; that is not cynicism, it is arithmetic.
Someone who asks about the ground before the surfaces. In this county, drainage and soil decide more outcomes than materials do. A good company will take a spade to your soil on the first visit, talk about winter water, and explain what the sub-base will be. A company that talks only about paving colours is selling you the tenth of the project you can see. Our construction method and our writing on clay ground explain the standard we hold.
Process you can see yourself in. Design should be a conversation with drawings in it: survey, concept, revisions, a full package you can understand. If a company cannot explain their process in a paragraph on their website, they will not explain it clearly on your garden either. Ours is written down — from first visit to finished garden — because we would rather you judge us on it.
Local fluency. It is not sentimentality: knowing that Harlow estates carry covenants, that Saffron Walden's conservation area is strict, that Bishop's Stortford North arrives with compacted subsoil, saves months and real money. Local councils have local rules; local designers have already read them.
What is planted matters as much as what is paved. Ask who writes the planting plan, what the soil preparation involves, and what the scheme will look like in February and in year five. Planting is where cheap gardens reveal themselves and good ones compound.
And the quiet test: do they say no? A company that agrees to everything on a first visit agrees to too much. The right answer to some briefs is a challenge, a phased plan, an honest 'that will fail — here is what will last instead.' You are hiring judgement, and judgement is mostly the ability to disappoint you gently in week one rather than expensively in year three.
The first visit is where you test all of this, and ours costs nothing. Bring the questions above. A studio that welcomes them is the one worth building with.