Bawnleigh
Bandon, Co. Cork
A garden built around three children and a dog, designed so it still looks like a garden and not a playground.
- Garden size
- 480 m²
- Project type
- Family garden
- Investment
- €44,000 – €50,000
- Programme
- 7 weeks
The brief
Two adults, three children under nine, one very large dog, and a lawn that had turned to mud by every November.
What we did
The drainage came first. The lawn was sitting on compacted subsoil left by the housebuilder, so no amount of seed was ever going to fix it. We decompacted the whole area, installed land drains to a soakaway and imported 120mm of screened topsoil before a single blade of grass went down.
Play is deliberately not fenced into a corner. The climbing structure sits within the planting, on bark, where it is visible from the kitchen window — which is what the parents actually asked for once we got past the list of equipment.
Surfaces near the house are porcelain because it survives scooters and washes clean. The far end is more relaxed: mown paths through longer grass, and a fire pit on gravel.
Outcome
The lawn has held up through two winters. The owners report the fire pit gets more use than anything else in the garden, which was not what anyone predicted.
The layout, before and after
The site survey and the finished design, drawn to the same scale on the same boundaries.
