Ditching lawn in favour of lush groundcovers, garden designer Richard Neville crafts a Point Chevalier backyard in harmony with nature.
Indoor-outdoor flow is a phrase frequently bandied around in our real estate-obsessed culture. Of course, for many of us, access to the environment from our homes is a vital part of living in Aotearoa.
But should we be more concerned with the physical flow outside or the emotion the outdoors conjures when we get there?
This home, owned by architect Naomi Rushmer and her family, deftly achieves both, thanks to its generous and considered garden designed by Richard Neville of Neville Design Studio. However, this sweet intersection of practical experience and emotional connection to nature was a long time coming.
Naomi and her husband bought the classic bungalow in the Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland suburb of Point Chevalier more than 20 years ago after a tip-off from her mother. “It was a shambles but had really good potential,” says Naomi. In time, she re-worked the interior scheme, renovating the rear of the home. Being a level site, it easily converted to an open-plan kitchen/dining arrangement and with the addition of generous bifold doors, family life and frequent socialising could spill outside to a deck.
As the years passed, Naomi sensed that more of the home’s potential could be unearthed. In an admirable example of family diplomacy, it was put to a vote. Should they continue renovating inside or focus on a pool and garden? The vote was unanimous: the garden won.
The first move was to install a pool and Naomi engaged Richard Neville to transform the surrounding outdoor space. “It wasn’t a case of Richard coming up with a planting brief,” says Naomi. “It was a question of, ‘How do we want to live in this garden? What did we want to experience?’”
This experiential design approach is an integral part of Richard’s ethos. He believes that feelings of connection enhance our sense of care. “Beauty releases endorphins. When we encounter beauty, we feel a desire to nurture it. Its perceived beauty compels us to take care of it.”
This garden is all about care and connection — connection with friends and family, connection with our place in nature, and the notion of tiaki/to protect and look after, too.
Richard says the brief was both detailed and loose. “The answer is always yes,” he muses. “When two designers walk into a space, there’s always healthy tension.” Getting to know each other, the design process unfolded collaboratively and organically — and Richard agrees that some mandatories in a brief (even Naomi’s particular plant requests, native, tropical and perennial, and insistence on warm gem tones of pinks through peaches) help push a designer’s thinking. “That’s where the magic happens,” he explains.
And magic did happen. The garden transformed into what the family fondly call ‘a secret oasis’. In this densely packed inner-city neighbourhood, privacy has been maximised, with not only a pool but now a spa, firepit and secret mancave, as well as several places to sip coffee, read, contemplate and entertain. A sign of its success is that it’s actively used by both parents and teenagers year-round.
With some of the garden already in place, including the pool and some mature nikau, Richard focused on where the opportunities lay and, importantly, how the new elements could interweave with the old, ensuring the garden feels like one composition. The architecture and hard landscaping elements were strongly linear, so he sought to offer a contrast with intentionally organic planting.
Early in the design, one of the bigger calls was deciding not to have a lawn. Not against lawns, Richard extols the benefits of the alternatives. “The canvas for planting and garden and, therefore, possibility just gets bigger. There are so many more options if you don’t have a lawn.”
This move has greatly affected the garden’s composition and painterly choice of plants. Layers of native groundcovers comfortably climb around perfectly placed rocks from a local farm, interspersed with thriving mamaku, ligularia and baby nikau. It’s a mix that evokes a Zen-like sense of calm and tender softness. “It feels like they’ve been there forever,” says Richard, reflecting on the plants’ remarkable growth, “but there’s an acute level of rigour in how things have been composed.”
The different experiences he wanted to create influenced the composition, especially upon entering the garden. Above an accessible side entry — frequently used by a close friend with a wheelchair — nikau palms create a comforting canopy, amplifying a feeling of enclosure that then opens up dramatically.
The unexpected use of a boardwalk brings focus to the experience of moving through the garden, connecting the backyard end-to end, including access to the pool and a hidden spa.
Richard not only considers emotion and the blending of old and new, but also the idea that the garden doesn’t have a specific beginning or end. As with our relationship with nature, there’s often a tension between control and letting things go. “The garden represents the playfulness between wildness and composition,” he says. “It is heavily composed but left to be a little bit wild, too.”
Richard’s design approach prefers to acknowledge all cycles of life: how nature changes and shifts, how things grow and die back. “Gardens are the most beautiful platform to see these kinds of processes happen — to learn and hopefully have greater respect for the wider natural world, too.”
With its now-seamless connection to the outdoors and the enriching experience of living within the landscape, this home and garden offers Naomi and her family a beautiful space to gain perspective on the world and deepen their connection with each other like never before.
Words Clare Buchanan
Photography Carme Aguayo & Scott Sinton