It took me 14 years to meet landscape designer John Brookes. We were both writing books for the same publisher when our editor suggested they could combine our books to produce the ultimate outside and inside guide to home design. It never happened, sadly.

John lives 15 miles from me near Chicester, with a studio at the centre of Denmans Garden, one of his own creations that is also open to the public. He has now published 24 books. It all started with Room Outside (1969), which has just been republished. Despite being over 40 years old, it’s the best book on the market about the using garden space to really live in. We can use our outdoors more fully if the integration of house and garden is planned well. The space surrounding a building (known as a “transition zone”) - whether terrace, courtyard, patio or veranda - is often seen as a buffer zone for circulation, kept free of trees to avoid the mess of leaf fall, branch damage and disturbance to foundations or simply out of fear of damaging wall surfaces. Buildings, especially houses, need the softening impact of nature or they can look forbidding, with hard edifices that make too much impact for domestic comfort.

Inevitably, in North America and warmer climates the transition zone is more effectively used for outdoor living. In the UK, we sometimes need to be reminded of our natural instincts to be outdoors and enjoy the efforts of our gardening labours. John points this out in this influential first book, explaining how to do this in an easy-to-access way with soft and hard surfacing, planting design, ground shaping and drainage, special features, garden furnishings. In short, he tells us how to make an outdoor room.

John has the look of someone who lives his own philosophy, rugged and weather-beaten due to a life spent outside As I discuss these things, I want to get out and be doing that now. Planting plants that we can see, smell, be near. Enjoying their scale, shape and experience their biological detail, not to mention the comparative colour, texture and shape. Standing back you realize that the assemblages we put together whilst making our gardens are truly awe-inspiring in their variety.

John recently judged the Slant Landscape Awards. The winners’ ideas, he told me, filled him with optimism. “River-Some” from South Korea and “Parque Del Delta” from Argentina. And a new online garden design school allows you to access John’s knowledge first hand.  For a modest sum you can download videos and learn garden design from the master - from the comfort of your kitchen table.

Steve Jobs and his wife Laurene almost had one of my kitchens. We’re going back 18 years to the autumn of 1994 when they contacted me through a mutual friend. I am sad to say they did not in the end go through with the kitchen, but I worked productively with the two of them as far as the production drawing stage.

Remarkably, for one of the world’s richest individuals, Jobs lived in modest style. He and Laurene were in their mid-to-late thirties when we met but did not seem interested in setting themselves up with bourgeois comfort and display. Instead, despite having two children, they lived a bit like self-disciplined students: the first things you saw inside the front door were a plumbed-in washing machine and a dryer (temporarily located there during building modifications). This was in Palo Alto in what they called their cottage, which they preferred to the big house down the coast in Woodside. They liked to think of the cottage as English. It was vaguely Arts and Crafts in style, a relaxed-looking interior somewhat under-furnished with Persian rugs and freestanding pieces. Unmissable was their love of music with piles of CDs, records and guitars about the place, the only objects that might amount to clutter. Unlike a real English cottage the house was light and spacious.

I went on to design a kitchen, utility rooms and some furniture. The kitchen brief was to keep a modern Arts and Crafts look in mind, with plenty of space for prepping and a circular central island. A walk-in cool chamber was an innovative feature.  The Jobses were staunch vegetarians, Laurene having set up a vegan food business. The kitchen was where they lived, albeit inherited from a previous owner, and consisted of boring white units with tiled tops and wooden edges. Nevertheless, it was the setting for the kind hospitality they showed to me, most of it on a cramped table in the corner sitting on chairs with wobbly legs.

As members of the Whole Earth Catalogue generation, vegetable gardening and self-sufficiency were important to the Jobses. We talked about redesigning the garden to provide more privacy for the house. Steve’s love of gardens was not generally known. We discussed creating outdoor rooms with borders, wild flowers clustered together to ensure plenty of colour, with privacy from the street. I spent time helping him find an English gardener.

During the following three years I saw Steve and Laurene at their home when I visited to polish up the design. We once met in London at the Savoy hotel during one of his rushed, but highly publicised European trips. His comments, as you might expect knowing his track record at Apple, were brief and to the point, mostly in the direction of simplifying the design, staking out a more severe, monastic approach. Shaker simplicity was often his default position. I suspect he became more of a modernist in the late nineties.

He was a very private person and reluctant to have any building work done, powerfully disliking noise, mess and invasion of their home. Steve recommended that I open a showroom in San Francisco, and I duly did in 1999. He said Americans needed to employ more serious design skills in their kitchens. The Jobses still live in the same house today. I noticed fans were scrawling messages on the pavement in front in a news clip today

He re-enforced a myth I grew up with, that America was the future, and that its technology was going to lead the world to a better place. We will be poorer off without him.

RIP