Blog Case study
This Altrincham garden transformation started with a simple ambition: a space that could work as a peaceful retreat, a social gathering area, and a showcase for the client’s own planting choices — all in one plot, tailored to the Cheshire climate rather than a generic outdoor-living checklist.
The Vision
The client wanted a genuinely multifunctional garden. That meant a pergola for shade and structure, a proper seating area for evenings outdoors, a paved patio for dining, planting with real seasonal interest, and practical storage that didn’t look like an afterthought bolted onto the side of the design.
The Process
We started with a site assessment covering sunlight, soil quality and drainage — the three things that decide whether a design idea actually works once it’s built, rather than just looking good on paper. From there, the layout was mapped out to maximise the usable space and give each element of the brief its own defined area within the garden rather than letting them compete for the same patch of grass.
What We Built
A wooden pergola anchors the garden as its main structural feature, giving the seating area below both shade and a sense of enclosure rather than leaving it exposed in the middle of the lawn. A paved patio with a gravel border sits alongside it, sized properly for outdoor dining rather than squeezed in as an afterthought. Flower beds bring structure and colour through the seasons, and a garden shed was integrated into the overall design rather than left looking like separate storage dropped in at the end.
Positioning the Pergola for the Cheshire Sun
Where a pergola sits relative to the house and the boundary makes far more difference to how it’s actually used than most homeowners expect. Positioned too close to a fence or a taller neighbouring structure, it loses the sun for large parts of the day; positioned without any thought for the sun’s path at all, it can end up throwing shade exactly where the dining table wants to be in the evening. We mapped sun and shade across the plot through the assessment stage before settling on where the pergola and the patio beneath it would sit, so the finished seating area actually catches the light when the family is most likely to use it — a detail that costs nothing extra to get right, provided it’s considered before the structure goes up rather than after.
The Result
The finished garden gives this Altrincham home a space that does everything the brief asked of it — somewhere to sit quietly, somewhere to entertain, and a garden with genuine planting interest rather than a lawn and a fence. It’s a good example of what a pergola and a properly planned patio can do together: neither one alone gives a garden the same sense of being a finished outdoor room.
Choosing a Pergola That Suits the Garden’s Scale
A pergola sized wrong for its plot is one of the more common mistakes we’re called in to fix on gardens landscaped without proper planning. Too small, and it reads as a token feature that doesn’t actually shelter the seating beneath it; too large, and it overwhelms a modest garden and crowds out the planting and lawn around it. Getting the proportions right against the size of the patio, the boundary distances and the house itself was as much a part of the design work here as choosing the timber finish — the kind of decision that’s easy to get wrong on paper and expensive to fix once the posts are set in concrete.
Planning a Pergola or Patio of Your Own?
A pergola and a patio, designed and built together, do more for a garden than either on its own — shade, structure and a proper entertaining space in one scheme. See our pergola installation and patio installation pages for how we approach this kind of project, or get in touch if you’re in Altrincham and thinking about your own outdoor living space.