Take a look at what Hand Made Gardens have been up to recently landscaping Adelaide gardens.
You'll see many garden design ideas Adelaide home owners often use as a starting point when looking at renovating their outdoor spaces, drawn from real jobs across Adelaide's southern, eastern, western and Hills suburbs rather than stock photography.
Four real completed projects, each solving a genuinely different problem rather than four versions of the same job: a dangerously steep, overgrown slope with an ageing pool needing structural work as much as a cosmetic refresh; a different Glen Osmond block with no machinery access and solid rock to auger through; a winery garden built over notoriously reactive clay soil; and an old pine deck long past its working life. Each case study below covers the actual brief, the real construction detail — base preparation, materials, quantities — and the finished result, not a marketing gloss.
Infinity Edge Pool Renovation and Landscaping
A steep, overgrown block in the Adelaide Hills foothills rebuilt around a renovation of the infinity edge pool with sweeping city views.
Timber Deck On A Sloped Backyard, Glen Osmond
A dangerous, overgrown slope on a different Glen Osmond block, rebuilt with retaining, steps and a code-compliant hardwood deck.
Garden Landscaping For A Willunga Winery
A tired verandah and lawn at a Willunga South winery, rebuilt around sandstone steps, new paving and a feature Weeping Mulberry.
Hardwood Decking & Garden Makeover, Oaklands Park
An old pine deck replaced with hardwood, alongside a full paving, lawn and irrigation makeover for the yard around it.
Sloping and difficult sites turn up repeatedly — two of the four needed engineered retaining, real level changes or machinery access solved before anything else could be built. Reactive soil, bushfire-zone construction rules and structural pool work are the kind of site-specific problems that don't show up until a real job is actually underway, which is exactly why the detail in each case study is worth reading past the photos.
The Glen Osmond deck build started with a proper design plan before any construction began — designed in partnership with Tony Stanton of Living Pictures, with Hand Made Gardens handling the hardscape and softscape construction from those plans. That's the same process available through our own garden design service if your project needs a proper plan drawn up first, not just a quote.
Materials vary project to project, chosen for the site rather than a house style — Basket Range sandstone at Willunga, engineered concrete block retaining and Merbau decking at Glen Osmond, hardwood decking at Oaklands Park. See our paving, retaining walls and timber decks pages for what's actually involved in each.
These projects draw on our timber decking, paving and garden design services, alongside irrigation, garden lighting and garden features worked in as each brief called for it. Still working out what you want from your own garden? Visit the Landscaping Ideas and Inspiration for ideas and garden renovation advice.
Every job above was built to the same standard regardless of scale — a full pool renovation and a backyard deck rebuild get the same attention to base preparation, drainage and finishing detail, because the things that actually cause a landscaping job to fail (a skipped compaction step, no fall for water to drain, an untreated timber joint left exposed to the weather) don't actually care how big or small the project is. That's as true of a full-scale renovation as it is of a single retaining wall or a weekend's worth of paving on a small job.
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