A new-build garden, properly resolved.
Developer-grade slabs lifted; a two-tier porcelain terrace laid in their place. Victoria Grey on a full mortar bed, a solid blue engineering brick step between the levels, carbon pointing, a Derbyshire Peak gravel channel catching the runoff and the eye. New build to finished garden in one programme.
The brief.
A new-build property in Fareham, handed over to the homeowners with the standard developer garden treatment — a small zone of mass-produced concrete slabs near the back door, then bare spoil running out to the boundary walls. Functional in the loosest sense. Not a garden anyone would want to spend time in.
The brief was to turn the lot into a single resolved hardscape: a place to actually use, finished to the same standard as the inside of the house. The plot has a natural drop from the back door out to the rear boundary, which we proposed to formalise as two distinct terraces rather than fight as a single flat plane — one for entertaining by the doors, one for the rest of the garden.
What we built.
The developer slabs were lifted and disposed of, and the sub-base was rebuilt across both tiers to spec — Type 1 MOT compacted in layers, falls programmed away from the house and the boundary walls. Nothing spot-bedded. Every slab on full mortar.
The surface is Victoria Grey porcelain, large-format, laid in a stretcher pattern with the long dimension running across the width of the garden — pulls the eye through the space rather than across it. Calibrated thickness, so the joints work out clean. Pointed in carbon-grey joint compound, which lets the slab read as a single surface rather than fighting it with a pale joint. The joint matters as much as the slab.
Between the two terraces, a step formed from solid blue engineering bricks laid on edge as a soldier course. The same product used at our Warsash full-hardscape build, and for the same reasons — near-impervious, hard-wearing, and the deep navy-black colour anchors the porcelain in a way a buff or grey brick wouldn't. At the foot of the step, a channel of Derbyshire Peak decorative stone — dark grey-black aggregate. Two jobs: it catches surface runoff coming off the upper tier and channels it away, and it gives the eye a hard punctuation line dividing the two zones.
The same Derbyshire Peak detail wraps along the base of the rear boundary wall — drainage where the wall meets the porcelain, plus a clean planting margin if the homeowners want to soften the elevation later.
A new-build garden, but finished to the same standard as any of the bigger projects. The detail is what carries it.
