How to: Disguise An Ugly Exterior View

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Let’s talk about views, specifically, the view out of your window! Now, it’s all well and good having a gorgeous interior but what happens when you open your shutters/blinds/curtains and are faced with an ugly exciting exterior view? That’s the case with this property here. Beautiful interior that opens up to a view of the colourbond fence and besser block retaining wall. Not exactly inspiring!

Disguise An Ugly Exterior View — The colour and texture in this one is inspiring – Naomi Findlay

Disguising an ugly exterior view using space medicine

I want to challenge us to create a view that brings piles of space medicine into the room. When you feel good with the inside, you open up the shutters and you’re going to feel great with what you see outside.

The good green stuff

The plan is to utilise some gorgeous greenery to help soften and disguise the retaining wall and colourbond fence. We are going to do that by using a concrete planter paired with an espalier frame. We will plant out the planters with some jasmine and other flowering, colourful plants and the espalier frame will allow that jasmine to climb up and block out the view of the fence and the retaining wall. It’s a very simple fix with a great result.

Constructing your espalier frame

While you can absolutely buy pre-made frames, we’re going to construct our own using some hardwood from another job. We’ve just constructed a very basic frame, tacked together with a couple of screws and we’ve used some pine offcuts down the bottom end for the part that will sit inside our concrete planter. We’ve also drilled some 3mm holes in each side of the frame to thread the espalier wire through.

Building an espalier frame — We are using hardwood to create a frame to age – Rowan Howard

Depending on the sort of pot that you’re using, you can even fix the frame directly to the pot through the back. And if you can lean it against something and then tie it back to the fence, that’ll balance all the weight. Once you’ve constructed your frame, it’s a simple process to run the wire that will be used as the climbing lattice, through the pre-drilled holes.

Espalier wire — 2 millimetre stainless steel wire

We used a two millimetre stainless wire that should be able to withstand the moisture the elements you’d expect it to get being outside and up against a plant. All you need to do is run your wire through like lacing up a shoe; backwards and forwards across the frame.

Plant it out

Once the frames are completed, it’s simply a matter of sitting them in the backs of the pots and back full with soil before planting some beautiful climbers that we can train to climb up and around the frame, softening the fence and retaining wall.