Alex Horlick
I’m a landscape and garden designer working across London and the UK to create contemporary, timeless gardens which are rich in atmosphere and beauty. My approach balances clean lines, considered materials and confident spatial design with ecologically sound, expressive planting.
I take time to understand my clients, drawing out the details that make a garden meaningful and personal. A past career in sound design for film and television sharpened my ability to interpret mood, tone and subtle verbal cues, translating what people say, or leave unsaid, into emotive and layered design responses.
A childhood on a farm in the Scottish Highlands instilled a deep love of plants, wild landscapes and natural plant communities, which continues to shape my work today. I graduated with distinction from the London College of Garden Design and bring a breadth of experience from years working as Senior Designer at Harry Holding Studio, where I led major residential and public projects played a key role in multiple award winning Chelsea Flower Show gardens, most recently for the Eden project.
Please see my website for more recent projects and if you are considering a new garden or rethinking an existing one, I’d love to hear from you.
The brief was to re-imagine the gardens for Cambridge Cottage, a Georgian building that is part of Kew Gardens and used as a wedding venue and for other events.
The design is based on the growth rings of a tree with the rings expanding from the heartwood at the centre of the garden. As the garden grows outwards the space becomes wilder, more informal, and elements of the wider landscape play a more important role.
We move from a clipped, controlled feel around the cottage towards looser more naturalistic planting with a woodland edge feel by the boundary to Kew Gardens.
The mature trees and attractive views are incorporated and built upon to link to the scenery beyond. Privacy is created with clipped Yew hedges, which along with cubed Hornbeam trees, help delineate the garden’s form. Both add structure and help lead the visitor though the space. Further out these clean lines fragment and are broken, clipped forms become multi-stemmmed trees, inspired by the forestry practice of coppicing.
The garden aims to create a flexible private setting at the centre of the garden whilst reconnecting the whole to the surrounding landscape, creating a link to Kew Green and more importantly through to Kew Gardens.
A design for a shared garden for two opposing offices drawing inspiration from the artwork ‘The Eight’ by Cyril Power.
Clean lines, polished concrete and white rendered walls are offset by soft naturalistic planting – grasses and arching forms to reflect the movement and tension within the art.
The garden aims to set a terrace floating in the clouds above a tranquil glade, with emphasised views into the woods beyond. A cubist representation of the local landscape runs through the garden below.
Reflecting pools of water bring the sky down below the terrace, soft forms and textures in the planting give the impression of clouds to contrast the modern lines of the design. The view out of this glade to the woods beyond is paramount – this is framed and reflected, with the garden focusing out towards this horizon.
The water represents the River Chess welling up and running through the town before cascading down to the water meadows below. Cubes of flint represent the piles of stone, the lawn is the dry valley the town sits within, and the densely foliaged top of the garden represents the Beech hanger woods sited above the valley.
