Liat and Oliver Schurmann from Mount Venus Nursery & Garden Centre in Dublin, have teamed-up with property advisors, Savills Ireland, to bring a different outlook to Bloom 2018 – Ireland’s largest garden festival.

For the past three years, Savills has worked with some of Ireland’s top garden and landscape designers at Bloom to create outdoor spaces found in modern, urban residential properties.

This year, however, the ‘Savills – A Different Outlook’ garden – appearing in the large garden category – will have a distinctive commercial property slant. 196,287 sqm of new office space was delivered in Dublin over the past year and, unlike the previous office construction cycle, many of these new developments provide outdoor space for employees – such as landscaped plazas, water features and rooftop gardens.

Garden Design

The ‘Savills – A Different Outlook’ garden at Bloom will consist of a roof garden, designed to wrap around a minimalist and subtle structure, comprising only structural glass walls and a flat green roof.

Speaking about the garden design, Oliver Schurmann comments:

“The office rooms will be sunk into the garden to achieve the worms-eye view of the surrounding landscape, giving the impression that the environment is so much larger and nearly endless. The water areas seem to expand far into the distance, the rock formations resemble mountains and ripples are projected by the sunlight on to the ceiling.

To allow for the general public to equally experience this shift of perspective we have deliberately raised the total garden area by 1m.

The planting style is naturalistic. Large irregularly shaped trees will determine the framework complemented by a layered planting of perennials and grasses. Green in all shades, textures and forms will dominate over some subtle flowers spotted around.

The interior is furnished with simple, functional and well -designed office furniture.”

Angus Potterton, Managing Director, Savills Ireland comments:

"This year, the Savills garden project marks a departure in both style and form.

Liat and Oliver cleverly use scale to distort our perspective within the garden, and in doing so, playfully reignite our imaginations and sense of fun for the outdoors.

Their work perfectly complements our culture here at Savills where we strive to offer a different outlook or perspective to our clients. For this reason, the partnership has been ideal and we hope the garden provides the public with a space in which they can reflect, and enjoy the surrounds."