What happens to kitchen design when the grip of conventional cabinetry is loosened? Johnny Grey Studios designed a garden kitchen that was on display at the end of May during the Chelsea Flower Show.

The concept behind this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, held at the Royal Hospital in London, was ‘increasing people’s connection with their gardens’. I exhibited with Alitex, the classy conservatory and greenhouse makers who commissioned our garden kitchen. JGS designer Leila Ferraby and I used materials that would withstand outdoor temperatures and moisture levels: stainless steel, granite, solid maple, coconut palm and ceramic tiles.

Inside rooms are often out of sync with the best garden views and key windows don’t always offer chances to view favourite scenes or plants. Kitchens and living rooms, not surprisingly, are designed with interior priorities such as maximizing size, circulation, or, traditionally, making a fireplace work.  According to research, the average British person spends 80% of their time inside, while the evolutionary expectation of our bodies is the reverse.  In our search for well-being it makes sense to rediscover living habits that allow us to be outside for longer. Hence my relatively new ambition to take the kitchen outdoors as far as possible.

As our stand was on the main avenue I had a lot of time to contemplate the show gardens. They had in common a desire to create a sanctuary, a place to escape the world and renew ourselves. Our hard wired need for nature aside, it has taken me a while to work this out as a key motivation for gardening, going beyond the beauty of plants and the alluring verdancy of nature’s offerings to a fulfilling and sustaining pathway to contentment. All the show gardens had outdoor covered space to increase opportunities to feel close to plants.

Professor Nigel Dunnett gets my prize for his garden for the Royal Bank of Canada. Inspired by William Robinson, the father of wild gardening movement from the nineteenth century. His garden had a foreground of wild flowers laid out in front of a shipping container, which was adapted into a garden room, its roof covered by plants. Nearby was a seating circle surrounded by birches, with woodland ground planting. Circular pools were fed by sustainable capture and re-use of water, and insects supported by his ‘bug hotel’ in the dry stone walls. From within the container, everything works to cocoon you in a beautiful garden that is both wild and contemporary.

Tom Hobbin’s Cornish Memories Garden was a linear design stemming from a modern pergola at one end. Wooden oval columns and curved, machined roof timbers supported an oval sheet-glass roof surrounded by dogwoods, rhododendrons and virburnum. Elegant water rills offering gentle background music for contemplation led into a natural swimming pool, which is based on coastal rock pools and planted with oxygenators to look like seaweed.

Luciano Giubbilei, an old friend I have worked with in the past, created magical planting in his garden for Laurent Perrier.

I could sit for hours and watch the light changing as it percolates through the canopies of the Persian ironwood trees, throwing shadows over the Peter Randall Page sculpted boulders. Bringing order to nature, one of Luciano’s themes, is one that they share together. On the BBC Luciano says ‘you can create the same atmosphere at a table as you can do in a garden’ - if he had not been a garden designer he would apparently have been a chef.

None of the Chelsea designs specifically develop my idea that it is possible to be outdoors for more of our lives, if we do what we do inside outside – cooking, eating, sitting before or after the meal (although I suspect this needs a fireplace). Provided with the right kind of outdoor space, we could be watching the garden and the sky instead of the television.

A garden kitchen is a new genre on the cusp becoming a popular addition to a well-planned property. It provides a way of immersing oneself in the garden’s realm, an easy and continuous way of experiencing nature, sunlight, trees and sky while still being protected from the elements. An open shelter, perhaps housed in a conservatory, orangery, pergola, loggia or semi-open structure that opens and closes according to climatic requirements. Whatever cover is chosen, it acts like an environmental filter; the idea is to be comfortable but as open to nature as possible.

It is important to realize that it is not a replacement for a kitchen. It is an additional facility, a rough luxe version where you can forget worries about storage where the furniture is plants as well as functional pieces of the carpentered variety. The locus is maybe still cooking, ideally with an open fire or with a suitable appliance for barbecuing but its companion function, and perhaps most critical one, is its role for outdoor congregation, either around a fire or with a table – placed in the open or under shade or weather protection of some kind. The third use is a more private one – communing with nature, de-stressing and enjoying the garden’s poetic and aesthetic pleasures.

The gardens that surround our homes are often divorced from the rooms inside and out of sync with views from key windows. Kitchens and living rooms are often designed to promote internal priorities such as maximizing size, serious décor work, circulation or, historically, making a fireplace work. According to research, the average Westerner spends 80% of their time indoors. The expectation our bodies have accumulated through evolution is the reverse.

In our search for well-being we need to develop living habits that allow us to be outside for much longer. We are hard-wired, as neuroscientists such as John Zeisel tell us, for prolonged exposure to the flowers, plants, green space and sky. Access to nature, as well as exposure to long views and seasonal routines, keeps us calm. Part of my work at JG Studios has been to develop a concept I have termed “instinct-based design”.

Creating outdoor kitchens is part of that programme. By listening to our instincts we can make kitchens and gardens that work together and make us feel good. The effort, time and expenditure that people lavish on their gardens is often wasted as the rooms of the house where most of time is spent are not visible.

Without French doors, growing beautiful flowers, trimming hedges, mowing the lawn, filling pots, building ponds and construct rose arbors’ seem a little wasted. ‘You own what you see’ has been attributed to Capability Brown. How many of us have that pleasure in our gardens?

JG Studios have been asked recently to design a number of garden kitchens and will be exhibiting at the London Chelsea Flower Show (25th-29th May) with Alitex - makers of conservatories and greenhouses and endorsed by the National Trust. It will be a great opportunity to explore the new concept of the garden kitchen further.

When we found this piece of burr oak, it was clear that this should be the key feature for our evolved take on a cooking island. Our vision for the piece began as a series of wonky-edge planks with gaps as cladding. Imagine looking across a field at night and seeing an old barn with gaps between the boards and light peeping through. The mystery of what lies behind and the darkness all around provides a comforting feeling as well as a desire to know more. We tried to capture that quality in this design.

The glass panels behind the burr panels are hand-cast, which blurs the impact of the concealed LED lights and creates a texture like captured water. The natural concrete is the same composition as that used in garden sculpture and incorporates the colour variations and natural imperfections found in the mix.

Leila Ferraby and Johnny Grey worked on this piece. It was made by Chris Thorpe and Adrian King.