7 Twenty percent of the construction money for outdoor structures

The balance of structure cost, size of rooms, beauty of windows, extent of construction in the outdoors around the house. All these things have an effect. If one leaves them all until the design is finished, then you end up stripping everything away, and what is left is just a bare shell — a cardboard box of the cheapest construction, with nothing but the plan left that one might call “architecture”.
So instead, I try, from the start, to balance things out, and to provide them according to their importance.

But there is an item of £2000 for the garden ornaments. I knew nothing of what we would do, nor how we would make them — not even what they would be made of (though I assumed some permanent masonry material).
Yet in the end it is the cast concrete spheres which add a finishing touch to the building. And their cost was not far off what I allocated on this day, two years earlier, without even knowing — in detail — what I was doing. I knew that some money would be needed for such a thing, and made provision for this money in my calculations from the very earliest moment in the process.

It does not have to be fancy. It is not intended to create an “effect”. It is merely intended to establish, truly establish, those centers which allow living structure to increase.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/7 The Character of Gardens#