The studio

Nicola Thompson.
Garden designer.

Nicola Thompson — Nth Studios Nicola Thompson — Founder

Nth Studios — Garden Design

Gardens have always been
where I do my best thinking.

I spent twenty years as a senior executive and CEO in high-growth retail businesses. You might think that's an unlikely background for a garden designer — but the skills transfer more directly than you'd expect. Building a consumer business well requires the same things a well-designed garden requires: a deep understanding of what people actually need, a clear strategy to bring it to life, careful reading of the environment, and an unrelenting attention to detail.

Gardening and design were always the passion running alongside that career. In 2023 I took a year out to train formally — undertaking a postgraduate diploma in Garden Design at the Oxford College of Garden Design. It confirmed everything I believed about what great garden design can do, and gave me the tools to do it properly.

Nth Studios takes on a small number of projects each year. That's a deliberate choice — each project deserves the full weight of attention, and that requires restraint about how many run at once.

Design philosophy

Structure first.
Always.

My approach to garden design is rooted in the tradition of John Brookes — one of the great figures of twentieth century garden design — whose emphasis on pattern, cohesion and proportion I encountered through his writing long before I trained formally. At Oxford I was fortunate to study under Duncan Heather, a protégé of Brookes, who deepened that foundation considerably.

"A simple garden with excellent proportion will almost always outperform a complex garden with poor proportion."

What this means in practice: I design from the bones outward. The spatial structure, geometry and proportion of a garden are established before a single plant or material is chosen. The decoration follows the framework — never the other way around. A garden should hold its quality even in winter, stripped of colour and growth.

I am also deeply interested in connection — between house and garden, garden and landscape, structure and planting. The gardens I admire most feel inevitable. They belong exactly where they are.

Naturalistic prairie planting with silver birch
Prairie planting with silver birch — the kind of naturalistic layering that sits at the heart of the Nth Studios planting approach.
Influences

On restraint
and scale.

The garden that changed how I think most recently is the Lynn Garden at Ascott House in Buckinghamshire — designed by Jacques and Peter Wirtz. It is the most extraordinary combination of scale and restraint. Almost a living sculpture. It made me understand just how little you need, if what you have is exactly right.

In 2009 I saw Luciano Giubbilei's debut Chelsea garden and it has stayed with me ever since. What struck me was the softness of the planting against the bold structure and form of the hedging and hard landscape — the tension between those two things was unlike anything I had seen. Years later I would study his work formally as part of my training, and understand more clearly what he was doing: treating clipped hedges and formal structure as architectural elements, then allowing softer grasses and refined planting to move through and around them. Restraint that feels generous rather than austere.

His philosophy — that a garden should unify nature, architecture and art into a single space — is one I return to constantly. The quality of light, the materiality of surfaces, the rhythm of repeated forms: these are the things that make a garden feel resolved rather than assembled.

The Lynn Garden at Ascott House, Buckinghamshire — Jacques and Peter Wirtz
The Lynn Garden at Ascott House, Buckinghamshire — designed by Jacques and Peter Wirtz.
Working with clients

Design should feel
possible.

A lot of design world communication is built to keep people out — language that signals expertise by making ideas feel inaccessible. I don't believe in that. My years working in consumer businesses taught me that the most effective way to work with people is to speak their language, not yours.

This doesn't mean compromising on quality or ambition. If anything it means the opposite — because when clients genuinely understand what a design is doing and why, they're more likely to back it fully and experience it as it was intended. Great design should feel exciting and achievable, not intimidating.

I believe completely in the power of a well-designed garden — in its ability to change how a family inhabits their life, to create spaces of genuine beauty that improve with age. That conviction runs through everything. The way I talk about it just doesn't require a design dictionary to follow.

Every project begins
with a conversation.

Get in touch