Outdoor furniture brand Nth Degree will complete a capital double next week when its second company and third overall showroom, opens on the same day as RHS Chelsea Flower Show, where it will have a Mediterranean-themed presence designed by Charlotte Rowe.
The retailer and supplier will open its Clerkenwell store – and its Chelsea stand – on 19 May.
‘The brief for the Nth Degree stand was a Mediterranean feel, and rather than take the obvious route, we asked ourselves: what does Mediterranean actually feel like? Not the postcard version — but the lived-in one. So, we imagined the stand as a fragment of a rustic villa — timeless and well-loved — reimagined through the lens of Nth Degree’s contemporary furniture. The mood and ambience we wanted to create was warm, earthy and slow living,’ says the award-winning garden designer and recently awarded Fellow of the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers.
‘Good outdoor furniture tends to have real confidence in its lines: clean, precise, often architectural. Our instinct is never to compete with that, but to offer something in contrast. On the Nth Degree stand at the Chelsea, rather than echo or compete with the furniture through formal or minimal planting, we did the opposite. The planting is soft, natural and has a little movement. It’s that tension between the crafted and the living that makes a space feel genuinely inhabited rather than staged.
‘One common mistake people make when incorporating garden furniture into their garden designs is choosing green furniture. It sounds counter-intuitive in a garden, but the human eye is extraordinarily good at detecting artificial colour within nature — and “false” green is almost impossible to hide among real foliage. We have a simple rule in the studio: leave green to the plants. Furniture in stone, charcoal, warm terracotta, buff colour, natural teak: these sit in the landscape rather than argue with it. The garden will always “out-green” anything you put in it.’
