Revisiting a French-Inspired Courtyard

Can you believe it’s July already????  We can’t either.  It’s a big month for us with my brother’s upcoming wedding (T minus three days and counting) and Haven!!!  We are once again following our tradition and revisiting one of our favorite posts from last July, and this time we are going back to my mom’s neighbor.  She has a perfect French-inspired garden squeezed into her city courtyard.  Enjoy!

Who says you have to live in the French country side to have a French inspired garden?  And who says it even has to be a garden?  My neighbor has excellent taste, and she designed a transformation for her courtyard that would fool anyone into thinking they were in France rather than Lexington, KY.

She is an artist, and so she knows how to work with a blank canvas and can envision what she wants and how to get it.

 

 

She even has the gravel pathways to fool the eye and the brain into thinking you are about to go on a garden stroll.

 

 

And she has little treasures tucked away secret garden style.

 

 

To keep it interesting, she depends on textures and keeps the colors to a minimum.  She has several white flowers like perennial Annabelle hydrangeas…..

 

 

…..and annuals like white geraniums.

 

 

Even though the courtyard is traditional with touches of rustic, this contemporary hammered stainless steel feature fits right in as the centerpiece of the entire area.

 

 

We enclosed our breezeway so it could become our mudroom, but she embraced hers with a fabulous sitting/dining area.  When the weather doesn’t permit eating in the open, she and her guests can eat under the roof.

 

 

I am crazy about this rustic table and bench.

 

She painted this huge oil that is the view of her garden opposite this sitting/eating area.

 

Her underground irrigation system keeps everything lush and green.

 

Here’s another gravel path, and it leads to her art studio.

 

 

Her open eating area is on a patio next to her kitchen.

 

 

This is the same view in our courtyard.  There’s quite a difference.  Our courtyard is almost entirely brick with planting areas around the perimeter.  Her courtyard doesn’t have any brick.

 

 

You can see how we each took a different approach to the way our courtyards look.  Ours Ralph Laurenish look was inspired by one of my trips to Paris, and her look was influenced by the French countryside.  Same, same but different.  There are six townhouses where we live, and each courtyard is completely different.

 Cheers!