Stone Stories: Paul Bangay
Q: Twenty years on, how would you describe Stonefields?
It is a very classically inspired garden. When I was designing the house, I was inspired by an Italian villa sitting on a hill. It’s not pastiche – it doesn’t look like an Italian villa, but it’s got the feeling of an Italian villa, and the garden sort of followed on from there. It’s very formal, very classical, timeless, with a soft planting scheme. It’s not a static garden: it’s always changing, there’s always new things happening – bulbs coming up, perennials flowering, roses blooming, autumn colour happening. It evokes a lot of emotion.
Q: How do you design today?
Our style has evolved and softened and we do a different look these days. A while ago, everyone wanted everything perfect. For example, you had to have the most perfect paving, you couldn’t have fossils in it, you couldn’t have seams in it. Now we’re looking for character, we’re looking for texture, we’re looking for broken edges, we’re softening the whole thing down. Now imperfection and informality are what we’re all striving for.
Q: How did you introduce informality into Stonefields?
It evolved with the planting scheme. We tried to soften the edges, experimented with new perennials and introduced as much softness as we could. We also tried to change as much paving as we could to Eco Outdoor’s Porphyry baguettes – I just adore them. When we first did the garden, we started with the custom granite from Eco, which is saw-cut, rectangular and perfect, and it married beautifully with the clipped box hedging. We changed them to the Porphyry in the rose garden and herb garden, and the movement in that paving enhanced and softened those spaces.
“A while ago, everyone wanted everything perfect. Now we’re looking for character, we’re looking for texture, we’re looking for broken edges, we’re softening the whole thing down."
Q: What is the attraction of a natural, imperfect material?
These days, I am looking for as much character and as much texture in the stone as I can get. The more imperfect it is, the more I love it. If you go around Europe and England and you look at gardens that are 300 years old, you see that character in the paving. It tells you a story about how that garden has been lived in and that’s what I want to try and reproduce here. Even though it was only 20 years old and not 200 years old, I wanted it to look like it had lived a life and could tell us stories.
Product Porphyry Filetti baguettes and Raven custom granite
Photography Simon Griffiths
