Designing for golden hour

Ask most people when they use their garden and the honest answer is: between six and nine in the evening. Ask most designers when they survey a site and the answer is: whenever the appointment was booked. That gap explains a surprising number of disappointing gardens.

Light is a material

We treat sun the way we treat stone — as something with a grain, a direction and a cost. On the first site visit we record where the sun lands at 8am, noon and an hour before sunset, in both summer and winter. Those six positions do more to shape the plan than almost anything the client tells us.

The reason is simple. A terrace that is beautiful at midday and in shade by six will be used at weekends and abandoned on weekdays. Move the same terrace nine metres west and it becomes the room the family eats in four nights a week.

Three rules we keep coming back to

Put the seating where the last light lands. Not where the view is best, not where the level change is easiest. If those happen to coincide, take it as a gift.

Plant into the light, not across it. Grasses, umbellifers and anything with a translucent seed head are transformed when the sun is behind them and worth almost nothing when it is overhead. Site them on the western edge of a bed and you get an hour of something spectacular for free.

Let the hard landscape hold the heat. Stone and board-formed concrete release warmth for an hour or two after sunset. A low seat wall on the sunny side of a terrace extends the usable evening by longer than any patio heater.

What this looks like in practice

On The Ridge Loggia the clients originally wanted the dining terrace on the north side of the house, where the view was widest. Our sun study showed it losing direct light at 4:40pm in June. We moved it eighteen degrees around the ridge, accepted a slightly narrower outlook, and gained two and a half hours of evening sun.

They eat outside from April to November now. That is the whole argument.