A city garden offers the ultimate luxury: peaceful retreat right at your doorstep. Yet gardens in urban neighbourhoods come with a trade-off—neighbours can easily glimpse into your private world. Thoughtful planting schemes and carefully positioned outdoor spaces solve this challenge, allowing landscape architect Noël Besgen to craft something even more powerful: a design that makes you forget about the surroundings altogether. His redesign of a historic villa's garden achieves exactly that—and then some, surpassing every expectation his clients brought to the table.

The compact space follows a disciplined layout. Paved pathways wind through lawn areas and glide past evergreen planting beds. Some existing plant structures and materials have been thoughtfully retained and woven into the new scheme. Newly installed yew and beech hedges reinforce the composition, frame the garden's edges, and define each bed. The bonus? They're virtually maintenance-free—requiring just two trims annually despite their varied heights. The ornamental grasses work just as hard with minimal effort. Their feathery plumes and multicoloured striping soften the design's geometric precision, while their seasonal interest keeps the garden visually engaging through autumn and winter. Come warmer months, white and burgundy-pink hydrangea blooms punctuate the lush greens of beds and lawn.

Perennials—verbena, catnip, and gaura among them—introduce pops of colour at various heights throughout the beds.

An intimate seating area for two, newly created just beyond the original garden wall, invites leisurely enjoyment of these views. A raised terrace adjacent to the house offers an elevated vantage point, newly surfaced with fresh timber decking. But the real privacy game-changer? A carefully composed grouping of three serviceberry trees and an evergreen holm oak now shields the garden from neighbouring properties. The magic of this green refuge extends well beyond the property line—it enhances the microclimate for the entire surrounding area. And that benefit ripples outward to the whole neighbourhood.

www.noel-besgen.de

Photography Credits:

Noël Besgen

(Published in CUBE Cologne Bonn 02|23)