Hamilton Terrace Penthouse

Planting for a penthouse on Hamilton Terrace in St John's Wood, where a terrace runs the full width of the building. Interior design and creative direction by No.12 Studio.

Planting into a canopy that already exists

Hamilton Terrace is one of the great tree-lined streets in London, and that landscape is protected. At penthouse level it changes the exercise entirely. This is not an empty roof waiting for a garden — it is a terrace sitting inside the top of a mature canopy that was there long before the building's current owner, and that will still be there long after.

So the planting has to answer what is already outside it. From a chair on that terrace the eye takes in the street trees and the pots in a single view, and anything too exotic reads as an intrusion at that height. The scheme works with the borrowed landscape rather than against it: forms, textures and greens that sit comfortably beside a London plane, and let the protected trees carry the scale while the terrace carries the detail.

A terrace that is also a wall

Running the full width of the building means the terrace is visible from every principal room. In an interior built on curated antiques, commissioned artworks and bespoke pieces — a marquetry dining table, a contemporary collection assembled slowly — that makes the planting part of the interior scheme rather than something added to the outside of it.

It was specified accordingly: what you see from the sofa, what frames the view from the dining table, and what the eye lands on last. A terrace read through glass for nine months of the year is a composition, not a garden.

Exposure at height

A roof terrace is a harsher place than a garden and it is routinely underestimated. Wind accelerates over a parapet, sun arrives unmodified, there is no ground beneath the planters, and nothing to rely on for water but what somebody gives them.

Everything specified has to hold its form through that — and hold it in January as much as June, because a terrace like this is looked at from indoors all year and used for only part of it. Evergreen structure does the work; anything that disappears for four months would leave the best rooms in the flat facing an empty parapet through the winter.

Credits

Design: No.12 Studio
Photography: Nico Wills
Planting: Plant Drop

Plant consultant: Dom Butler