The aims of the gardens were to be temporary and needed to provide an appropriate setting for the Sales suite. The proposals had to achieve planning permission and be built to the scheduled opening date in Spring 2012.The key requirement was to create an awe inspiring landscape that told the story of the future Linear Park for London and what it will be like to live there. The project also needed to meet a number of pragmatic design parameters namely budget, purpose, design life and site context. These issues were addressed in association with Arup and resulted in the placing of a ‘Jewel’ containing the show apartments within a magical garden, insulated from the road by a wall and accessed via a ‘catwalk’ path.The Wall is a symbolic reference to the planned buildings along Nine Elms Lane. The act of passing through the wall into the garden reflects the journey from the clamour of the city to the calm and serenity of the future park, via a transparent ground floor realm opening to spectacular river views from the upper roof terrace. The vegetative landscape was distilled from an image of an ant hill meadow and woodland glade providing a distinctive setting for the building on the cusp of two ecologies.The marketing team have noted that the ‘dwell time’ of visitors to the Suite and Garden is significantly longer than to any other sales suites.