Terrace Garden Landscaping Design

​Adding up extended living space to a house can be quite interesting if you have even mild interest in plants, herbs, shrubs, flowering plants, etc. A lot many more people consider themselves as not the ones with a green thumb, but that’s actually not true.

Yes, growing and maintaining plants at your terrace the garden will take some amount of good time in a week but if you plan, select and execute it strategically and carefully, the results will be more than satisfactory. So here with this piece, we are sharing our thoughts and guidelines for planning and designing terrace gardens.

There can be a variety of shapes for the terrace garden. Like rectangular, square or oblong shape, but before you start following the steps as follows:

Step 1: List down all the plants that you are thinking of having in your garden. Make a pictorial image of those plants by searching the same on the internet.

Step 2: Prepare a small list of your must-haves on the terrace.

• Seating area (only for two people or four people.)
• Foldable seating / permanent seating.
• Comfortable seating or coffer house seating
• So on and so forth….

Do spend some time to prepare this list, but be courageous enough to discard which are too many. Terrance garden will require regular watering, composting and maintenance, etc so be frugal in making your decision to only have a minimalist approach in selecting the overall features of your terrace garden.

Step 3: Once all the essential features are considered and finalized, then browse online for a few terrace garden inspirational images.  Do keep only a few as a greater number of them will only create confusion and not results. If you are developing and designing your terrace garden for the very first time, then it will be well to select six essential features out of your wish list and then develop a plan drawing layout out of it. The drawing may look somewhat look like this.



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Note :- You can watch our youtube video to learn about drawing a terrace garden layout.

 

Step 4: After you have the first draft drawing of your terrace garden, spend the next couple of days to study it, and also discuss it with your friends and family. This will help you to get a better idea about other points of view. Do remember to make a drawing on a piece of A4 paper and not on the computer. Once you have some comments and feedback you can develop some more options and ideas for your layout. Remember to have enough hardcopies so as to move around or to place the furniture along with softscape.
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Step 5: Within the layout, once the hardscape is defined locate all the places for plants and shrubs. Make an arrangement that is more like a cluster and think of plant gradation i.e. higher plants being behind and smaller plants being in the front. Also, make a selection of fragrant and non-fragrant shrubs that need to be part of the overall scheme along with the colour shade. 

 

Step 6: Even though the layout is not yet executed do make a broad judgment about lighting for your plants and the terrace to get an overall look and feel of the place. Think about it well, if it will be wired or solar powered etc. Check some sample products online and try to incorporate them into your terrace garden layout to see the total no of them that you will need.
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Step 7: With this, we come to the end of the planning process for developing a terrace garden layout. Now it will be good to make a list of all the work that needs to be done so as to arrive at an approximate costing for your project.

Main elements will include
S O F T S C A P E

1. Planters (cork, mud, cement or plastic)
2. Soil
3. Manure
4. Watering equipment.
5. Garden maintenance equipment etc.
6. Plants, variety and nos, etc

H A R D S C A P E

1. Planter box
2. Lights and wiring
3. Floor finishes
4. Waterproofing membrane, etc

There may be a lot many more queries or doubts but do give it a try and if you feel then we can work along with you for developing your garden design. Do write to us at homeplansindia.mail@gmail.com

Online Architecture Service during World Pandemic COVID-19 in April 2020

It is not one of the best times in our life right now with the wide spread of Coronavirus pandemic and being home quarantined. We have been through tougher times during World War I and World War II, but nothing compared to this. As we are all under city wise & state wise lockdown in India, we at homeplansindia.com are hopeful to work towards giving a reason to those who have been meaning to design and build their house. Due to the forced lockdown the only things left for us is to take care of ourselves and our family (Also to keep our mental sanity).

As things are currently not under our control the only things that we can do is to organise & control our life at home. This is a good opportunity to ponder on things which have been on our mind for quite a while, but have not been dealt with. Every one of us will have a bucket list of things to do for ourselves or for our family. So, if you are in the midst of this and have been planning to do up your house design, then let's talk.

​1.  Creating a daily Schedule of personal and professional work is helping us to keep up with the focus at our architecture design work. It is surely taking a lot more of discipline and perseverance than what we expected, but it is the new way of work which can become fruitful if we manage our path well for each day. It is a lot less distracting than office with lesser number of coffee breaks.

2. This time is better for the projects that we currently have in our hand as we can spend some more time to ponder through the design and develop them better (with lesser office distraction) and can have more specific thoughts towards health and hygiene issues.

3. The current scenario has given us a stark jolt to bounce back with a fresh look to our architecture design process and allow more space for cleanliness, natural light and ventilation for all designs. It is also a good idea to adopt minimalism as part of our designs as it’s about the environment in which we live in, making it more practical and rational dealing with bigger life problems.                                                                    

​4. Now seems to be the right time to adopt green design, building material and sustainability to make it the language for expressing all our designs for any project. It is no more a fashionable sentence (mostly used by professionals to explain their designs) and rather a necessity for all designs. Health and hygiene have come to the forefront and now aiming the design to be well prepared and equipped for the environment of the future.

​5. We will emerge out of this pandemic (hopefully by May 2020 in India), with a new approach towards our work life knowing we can organize our work and professional commitments from remote locations and can co-ordinate with our clients and staff in the same manner even from office. The prime focus will be work and the outcome, not with the location where we operate from, helping us save a lot of our time and effort.

This lockdown has motivated us to explore more of the online technology to keep progressing with our Architectural Practice in India. We do see it as a bright new beginning which will be more thoughtful towards our environment and people alike. Architecture Practice in 2020 will be remembered as an era which survived the pandemic COVID-19, as well as managed to evolve for the better.

Note:
Our Online Architecture practice started in 2011 and the idea has been to reach out to a greater number of people from India who cannot reach a professional architect in their locality. The idea has always been to provide best practice to all which we follow in Mumbai at very affordable prices (still our fee structure will be higher than local architects). Hoping that with this new drive and a new beginning we will manage to explain the novel initiative leading to a better future.
Do write back to us with your comment's at homeplansindia.mail@gmail.com