Chelsea Flower Show 2023 - Inspiring our al fresco dining design
Summer is on the horizon and in our opinion one of the best ways to spend your days in the summer heat is through dining outdoors.
The UK now has a thriving outdoor dining culture, and al fresco dining spaces are a common sight in many city centres and towns. This is, in part, a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Outdoor dining has gone from necessary to the norm.
Inspired by our recent trip to RHS Chelsea Flower Show, we at Phoenix Wharf have been thinking about how we can help maximise our clients’ outdoor dining spaces with the use of exuberant planting, bold colour, and innovative textures.
You can see all of this in abundance through Manoj Malde’s garden, Garden of Unity. His colour palette of orange and pink is inspired by Manoj’s Indian heritage and the boldness of clashing sari colours worn by Indian women. These colours used cleverly in the textured wall panels bring a sense of fun and inclusion to this dining space. Traditional Indian cushions on the seating play up to the overall feel but add an essential level of comfort to the harder, weather proof materials more generally used for outdoor furniture.
Sustainability is a key principle in the garden, from peat-free planting to the use of reclaimed materials, such as the pathway created from limestone slabs and slivers of recycled limestone. External flooring can often be forgotten when it comes to aesthetics with slip resistance’s and other features taking precedent over design but today there are endless opportunities to add an extra layer to your space with cool tiling, composite decking and unique reclaimed materials.
Another garden that really captured our attention was the London Square Community Garden by James Smith.
This garden symbolises the power of gardens to bring people together which is perfectly aligned to our intent when creating outdoor dining spaces for our clients. Not only do we see possible profitable benefits of introducing alfresco dining, but there are also other potential advantages of this notion such as health and happiness.
The London Square Community Garden - James Smith
The sense of bringing together a community is the thread running through James’s garden, where people can meet, relax, share food and connect with nature.
The addition of a pergola creates a welcoming meeting space that houses an outdoor kitchen, a big communal table inset with chess and draughts boards and individually styled upcycled chairs by The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades. James’s idea that the chairs represented different people in communities and that anyone should feel welcome to pull up a chair at the stunning terrazzo dining table by Diespeker was something that really sung out to us.
