The Weekend Australian

Featured in The Weekend Australian Magazine in June 2019, our Bellevue Hill hilltop retreat shows what a disconnected site can become. The rear garden had been mostly paving around an old pool, with derelict stairs to an unused lower level and no link between the two. Construction took three months from January 2016, while the property was still a building site.

Our answer was a curved staircase and terraced beds tying the two levels together around a circular firepit, now the heart of the garden, which doubled the size of the rear yard. We clad the walls in Sydney sandstone and tucked a floating timber bench into the curve for evenings by the fire. The planting steps down in layers, blue chalksticks, burgundy flax ‘Bronze Warrior’ and Agave attenuata mixed with two dragon’s blood trees, so it feels like walking through greenery as you descend. A seven metre clumping slender weaver’s bamboo replaced a tired line of junipers on the boundary, settling in fast as a green screen despite the clients’ worries about privacy.

Below street level and in the shade, the front garden runs to bold tropical foliage: giant Madonna lily, tree ferns, Rhapis palms, black elephant’s ears and Philodendron ‘Rojo Congo’, with native violet carpeting the sandstone stepping path. It is proof that the hardest part of a site can become its best feature.