Belgravia Townhouse

A family home in Belgravia, designed for a creative client and her young family by Buchanan Studio. We worked closely with Angus Buchanan and his team to specify, install and maintain the statement trees and planting across the house. Featured in House & Garden.

A tree chosen for one piece of architecture

The largest specimen is a Black Olive, Bucida buceras, and it was not chosen from a category. There is a step in the glazing on the stair, and the tree was selected to sit into that step — to hug the change in the building and, over the next few years, to grow up and around it until the two read as one thing.

That is a different exercise from finding a big tree. It means going to the grower with the dimension of a specific piece of architecture in your head and looking at actual specimens until one of them answers it. Two Black Olives of the same height would not have done the same job.

The other rooms

The sitting room takes a Quince Tree, Heteropanax chinensis — an unusual choice indoors, with a fine, layered leaf that suits a room people actually sit in rather than photograph.

The master ensuite takes a double-stemmed Manila Palm, Veitchia merrillii. A bathroom is one of the few rooms in an English house with the humidity a palm actually wants, and the double stem gives it height for a tall room without the bulk.

A family house, not a set

The distinction that shaped everything: this is a home with young children in it. Plants have to tolerate being lived around — knocked, watered irregularly, occasionally moved — and the scheme was chosen with that in mind rather than for a photograph taken on the day it went in.

And we look after it

One of our horticulturists visits regularly to water, feed, prune, clean the leaves and catch problems early. On a scheme where one tree was chosen for one position and is meant to grow into it, maintenance is not upkeep — it is the rest of the design.

More on how that works on our plant maintenance page.

Credits

Design: Buchanan Studio
Planting: Plant Drop

Plant consultant: Dom Butler