Jacob Berry’s Wellness Garden Featured in The Telegraph

Refined Landscapes founder Jacob Berry’s personal wellness garden has been featured in The Telegraph’s article on outdoor showers, placing his own approach to outdoor bathing, cold water and wellness-led garden design within a wider conversation about how people are using their gardens differently.

For Refined, this is more than a press mention. It reflects a subject that has become increasingly central to the studio’s work: how a garden can support the way people want to live, recover, reset and reconnect with the outdoors.

The growing interest in outdoor showers, cold plunge areas, saunas and wellness gardens is easy to reduce to trends. For Jacob, the more important question is how these elements are designed into a real residential setting so they feel natural, private, usable and connected to the wider garden.

A personal garden, a wider design conversation

Jacob has explored wellness garden design personally as well as professionally. His own garden has included cold water and outdoor shower elements, giving him a direct understanding of how these spaces need to work day to day.

That matters because a wellness feature is only successful if it is genuinely used. A shower needs privacy, access, drainage, materials that feel right underfoot and a route that makes sense from the house. A cold plunge needs calm placement, safe movement and a sense of enclosure. A sauna or bathing area needs to feel considered rather than imposed. To see that in a finished garden, watch Jacob Berry walking through one of our BALI award-winning projects, where the wellness features are integrated around the planting and design of the space.

The design challenge is not simply whether a feature can be installed. It is whether the garden can make the ritual feel natural enough to return to throughout the year.

Why outdoor wellness belongs in the garden

Outdoor wellness works best when it belongs to the landscape. Water, heat, cool air, planting, light, timber, stone and seasonal change all affect the way the space feels and the way it is used.

This is where garden design becomes more powerful than product specification. A well-placed outdoor shower can feel both invigorating and quietly ordinary. A cold-water area can be private without feeling hidden. A sauna can become part of a wider sequence of movement, rest and planting rather than a standalone object.

For clients, the value is not in owning a feature for its own sake. The value is in creating a garden that makes better routines easier to practise: stepping outside before the day begins, recovering after training, sitting by water, moving between heat and cold, or building a calmer relationship with the outdoors.

The Refined approach to wellness garden design

For us, wellness garden design sits within the wider discipline of designing and building exceptional outdoor spaces. It connects with layout, privacy, materials, planting, lighting, drainage, construction detail and aftercare.

That connected approach is what keeps the result from feeling trend-led. Wellness features should not be dropped into a garden at the end. They should be considered as part of how the whole space will be lived in.

Jacob Berry’s walkthrough of The Poolside Garden shows this in practice: how the wellness features were incorporated into the zones of the garden, and the practical resolutions that came with them, including cancelling out road noise. The full Poolside Garden case study is in the portfolio.

For a deeper look at this thinking, read A Garden for the Life You Mean to Live, which explores why wellness gardens are best understood through intention, ritual and the life they help support.

From recognition to real projects

The Telegraph feature gives external recognition to an area of garden design that Refined has been developing with care. But the principle applies beyond one garden or one feature.

Whether the brief includes an outdoor shower, cold plunge, sauna, swim setting, contemplative seating, water, fire or a quieter planted retreat, the aim is the same: to create a garden that feels grounded, beautiful and genuinely usable.

For clients considering wellness garden design as part of a wider garden design or outdoor living design project, the most useful starting point is a conversation about the life the garden needs to support. To begin that conversation, start a conversation.