Case study · Pontcanna, Cardiff
The courtyard that was a corridor
A dark side-return behind a Victorian terrace — 6 m wide, 9 m long, north-facing and used for storing bins. Now it's the room the house didn't have.
- Budget
- £14,200 inc. VAT
- On site
- 3 weeks, April–May 2024
- Size
- 54 m²
- Aspect
- North-facing
The before
Catrin and Huw's garden was what estate agents call “low maintenance” — cracked 1970s concrete, a rotary drier, and a fence held up mostly by ivy. Because it sits north of the house, the received wisdom was that nothing would grow and there was no point trying. The whole space was effectively a corridor to the back gate.
What the space had going for it: good brick walls on two sides, a level base, and — for exactly four hours on a summer evening — beautiful raking light down the side-return. That light became the whole design.
The story of the build
We stripped the concrete in two days (four grab loads — Victorian builders didn't do thin slabs). The levels went down 180 mm, which let us set the new porcelain flush with the kitchen threshold: one step out, not two down, which is the difference between a garden you use and one you look at.
Week two was the quiet, unglamorous work that makes a courtyard last: drainage falls to a new channel, a full mortar bed under every slab, and cabling for lights run before anything was laid. The corten planters arrived powder-dry and spent the week rusting to colour in the rain — the clients were sceptical, then delighted, in that order.
One thing went sideways: the jasmine we'd specified was unavailable at planting size, so we swapped in a more mature Trachelospermum from a Monmouthshire nursery at no extra cost and re-jigged the wire spacing on site. It covered the back wall by the end of the first summer.
The after
The finished courtyard is 54 m² of pale porcelain, three corten planters of ferns, grasses and that jasmine, a slim oak bench on the sunny wall, and warm low-level lighting on a dusk timer. Because everything is flush and frost-proof, it gets used from March to Christmas — Catrin works out there most mornings from May.
Plant list, for the curious
- Trachelospermum jasminoides — evergreen cover and July scent on the back wall
- Dryopteris erythrosora & Polystichum setiferum — shade-happy structure in the corten
- Hakonechloa macra — movement where the evening light rakes through
- Heuchera 'Marmalade' — a nod of earth-tone colour against the rust