A practical yet playful London garden by Buchanan Studio | House & Garden

The garden room at the back of the Buchanan's inner-city London garden

“The beauty of small, city gardens is that you can design it like a room," explains Charlotte, one half of the dynamic design duo, Buchanan Studio. “You track the sun, you lay out how you're going to use it, and then you make out a wish list, just like you would in a house," says the other half, Angus.

It's no wonder the Buchanans approached their small, city garden like an interior, having had such roaring success as an interior design studio across interiors, events, fashion and product design. Named in House & Garden's Top 100 list for the last two years, the atelier is known for its fusion of functionality and fun, where their utility and flair result in moments of design genius, like a lobster headboard and breast-adorned bathtub for artists Philip and Charlotte Colbert, or tile-adorned beach huts in their elegant and innovative London bathroom. And their first venture into garden design – having previously only “enhanced clients' outdoor spaces” – had similarly enchanting results.

Much of the furniture and objects would work inside or outside

Despite the garden requiring a lot of maintenance (something Angus has taken on with green-fingered gusto), both Angus and Charlotte insist that designing a small garden shouldn't be an impossible venture with predictable features: “Don't just look at what you've got and feel deflated. Think about what you want and see if you can get elements of it." For the couple, who have two young children and a taste for countryside living, the priorities were: “having a small area to grow vegetables, somewhere for the children to be able to muck about and get muddy, somewhere to eat and cook, and somewhere to sunbathe.”