In the garden, just like any other setting, there are things that we do automatically. Things that happen without being questioned and that perhaps we should be subjecting to a bit more deliberation. It’s easy to lose sight of whether the done thing might or might not be the right thing for you. It’s the done thing and inevitably the done thing will do.
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| The Ubiquitous Sliding Patio Door |
Where do you stand on the mandatory 1.8 metre wide sliding white PVC double door at the back of the house? Is it any good? Well, every house built post 1990 seems to have one so they must be all right. All right, in certain circumstances but definitely not all.
At the risk of being labelled a dissident I am going to unilaterally declare that not every single house built in the nation calls for a six foot wide sliding white PVC door from the kitchen to the back garden. Some houses won’t have the right aspect, some won’t have an exterior that anyone would want to gaze upon and nobody to create one, some homeowners have not got the slightest interest in “bringing the outside in”. Some homeowners close the curtains on sunny days. All a sliding double door does for them is provide a panoramic view of the burgeoning pizza box mountain just outside it.
Your Ma was right when she told you it would be a dull world if the back of everyone’s house incorporated identical spatial dynamics. The idea of the patio door was seized upon by a “developer” in 1988 as being the zenith of continental sophistication and we haven’t been able to relinquish it since.
We are very good at developing an approach to a particular thing and sticking with it regardless of the nuances of the specific setting. The poor maligned patio door is only one entry on the honour roll.
Does every bungalow built in the country need to have a hundred yards of hedge removed to be replaced with post and rail fence and a laurel hedge? No, but it’s the done thing.
Does every house need to be a shrine to the motor car with swathes of tarmacadam circumnavigating the place? Probably not. It’s grand when all wee Oisin wants to do all day is fly around the place on his trike or bike but we all know that particular belle epoque comes to an end fairly quickly with kids. Then what, becalmed in the black sea? Do we really need to be able to park sufficiently close to the back door to be able to step directly from the driver’s seat into the utility room, even a few yards of a buffer, anyone?
And what about this one, the mother of all done things; the once off house in the rural setting positioned closer to the back of the site than the front. The back garden is the one that’s used, for frying open air burgers, kicking football, chasing your kids with the power washer, all sorts of stuff. Why would you deliberately curtail its space in favour of the pine peppered parkland to the front? A front that nobody will ever use but merely pass through on the way to and from the house and the real garden, out the back.
I guarantee it won’t be long until you’re cursing the size of it and wishing you had corralled a bit more of your plot behind the line of the building where you can do as you please. Instead of squandering your summer weekends scuffing the driveway, egding and resuscitating oceans of beds inevitably filled with dreadful euonymus, holly and escallonia.
Honourable mentions must also go to the precast concrete kerb, the triangular precast wall capping, the stone clad tapering wall and pier with wrought iron entry gate, those fake plastered quoins on each corner, the cluster of birch, the unrendered wall, the unforgivable picnic bench and the unmentionable railway sleeper.
The done thing ain’t doing it anymore.
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