Kate Eyre Garden Design

Worked with Emma on our small London garden planting design. I am blown away by the results. She was excellent throughout the process, understanding the brief and style that we were looking to achieve. She organised all the plants to arrive, they were planted when i was at work, and she has continued to support with ideas for bulbs to plant as we near winter. Could not recommend enough. Really helpful, stunning result and all within a sensible budget.

These guys are great to work alongside! It is always a pleasure to help create the incredible spaces they design and we couldn't recommend them more.

Similar to quite a few other reviewers here. We contacted Kate in September 2021 to draw up designs and carry out the work. We told her our budget and she said she could do the work in January. She came up with a design that turned out to be 5 times our budget when she finally priced it (only after full payment). She also then said she didn’t have availability until much later at that point. It seems like she never wanted to carry out the work but just wanted the design fee.

Overloaded, inexperienced, did not pay enough attention to written and spoken detail, lost track of what was going on, poor customer care, and produced a design that could not be built within our constraints. We do not recommend. We came to Kate Eyre Garden Design in late May for a new garden design for our rectangular terrace measuring approx. 60sqm. We were initially attracted to this company because we felt the entire design and build process would be managed from beginning to end with their expertise. Sadly the most basic constraints that we had were never followed. Most important of all was our initial build budget of £20k, and how to workaround the physical limitations of our existing terrace (such as stonework that could not be moved, and weight loading considerations) which was clearly mentioned at the beginning. The design process took three months to complete as they were so busy on everything else. Whilst the basics of the designs themselves were nice, the drawings were in 2D and lacked detail with the specification. At the end of this process we discovered the design team had insufficient conversations with the build team. The build quotation was a completely unexpected £50k+ - at 2.5x over our budget. Nobody technical from the build team came to visit and survey the site. On top of this, we later found the plants they recommended were toxic to children which breached another of our requirements. Several other things had gone wrong by this point. Six months passed and following a lot of stress, the option presented to us was to subtract elements of what was already in the design to meet the budget. The most recent sketch and quotation remained at over £32k. It comprised of two 22+17sqm rectangular decks at £16k with nothing on there, 20sqm of rectangular lawn at £4k, and 5sqm of planting, soil, and irrigation at almost £10k. Plus clearance at over £2k. This was highly disappointing. They should never have taken us on as clients if they didn't know how to work with our requirements. One would need an average build budget of over £830+ per sqm to proceed. Our £2k design fee was basically wasted.

Kate and her team help design our front garden. They did an absolutely superb job. They were fast, professional, creative, and delivered a beautiful layout, including plants and paving. The garden has now flowered and it is a great source of joy and compliments from passers by. Very happy clients!!

Very disappointing. We engaged Kate Eyre, stage 1 is to draw up plans with a view to a full garden project. The plans were ok, certain parts were impractical and we felt there was an initial push to do completely unnecessary work which resisted. Main complaint is it was very difficult to get hold of Kate, my sense is they had taken on too much work and didn’t have the resource to execute. Several delays in providing plans, further delays in providing costings, took an age to offer availability by which point we had given up and gone elsewhere. We still had to pay full price for the plans, a cool £2k, for nothing. Wouldn’t recommend unless improvements in resourcing.

We have sadly had quite a bad experience with Kate Eyre due to a number of factors. I hope that we were “unlucky” and that the experience we had is not replicated with others. We really liked Kate when we first met her on Webex back in January, so much so that we didn’t follow up with any of the other designers we had contacted. We were planning on undertaking our garden project at the same time as a huge house renovation which is underway and going very smoothly. I don’t want to go into the detail here but our whole experience caused us an enormous amount of stress. Here are a few examples: Kate mispriced the job considerably, both underpricing key elements leaving us with £16k worth of “surprises” in our patio cost, and choosing items such as a £43k fire pit despite us explaining we are on a budget and need to do the project over 3 years. We tried on a number of occasions to confirm that Kate wanted to continue with the job as she took over 2w to reply to emails, despite numerous chasers and kept going back and forth about who would be supplying various parts of the job. Eventually, with 2w to go before she was meant to start she pulled out of the job completely leaving us up in a very difficult position, especially as we were trying to coordinate so many parts of our project. We are still trying to find landscapers to fulfil the design but most want to start from scratch and are charging us for a new design. We wasted a few thousand pounds (which is not negligible!) on a design we can’t use and 8 months of our time trying to make it work. If she had told us months earlier that she couldn’t take on the job, then at least we would be in a better position to find someone else.

Kate and her team did a fantastic job on our garden. It needed a complete redesign and rebuild of hard and soft areas, as well as the border fencing. It was designed and delivered (with flexibility for our changes during the process) very professionally, We appreciated not having to deal with multiple contractors, as everything was managed in-house. We are delighted with the results and are very happy to recommend Kate.

Kate and her fabulous team have absolutely transformed our back garden. From the initial design through to installation, the whole process has been professional, collaborative and of an exceptional standard. All our wants and wishes were listened to and incorporated in a fresh and interesting way, and the end result is nothing short of stunning. We are beyond delighted!

I would highly recommend Kate Eyre Garden Design. The team were a pleasure to work with from design to build. Great attention to detail and quality of workmanship. We’re thrilled with the results and can’t wait for the summer to enjoy our garden in all its blooming glory.

Kate and her team have just completed our garden redesign and installation. The results are amazing and we are completely thrilled with our garden transformation. Lovely people and quality workmanship. The perfect combination! Huge thanks.

Highly recommend Kate and her entire team. From our first meeting with Kate to discuss a garden design to the completion of the project, everyone we were in contact with was friendly and helpful and the whole project took much less time than we expected and yet was well withing our planned budget! Any question, no matter how small, was immediately taken into account. The actual work only took 3 weeks, much to our delight. The finished garden is even lovelier than I imagined it would be and full of the colors I wanted. Even in these current dreary, rainy days, the garden is beautiful and restful.