When Ade Adepitan and his singer-songwriter wife Linda first moved into their home in West London six years ago they couldn’t get into the garden because it was so overgrown and "looked like a BMX track".
SEE: Ade Adepitan and Linda's beautiful wedding at St Paul's Cathedral
"I grew up in a two-bedroom council house and we had a tiny garden," says the basketball Paralympian.
"It wasn't that much fun and I've always longed for green space since I was a kid."
The happy couple raising their glasses in the garden
Showing us their newly transformed green oasis, Ade describes it as his "favourite room in the house", which also serves as a wonderful playground for his one-year-old son, Bolla, who can enjoy an outdoor space in a way that Ade, who contracted polio at 15 months, wasn't able to.
"It will change with the seasons: we'll have flowers blooming, butterflies and lots of birds, so Bolla will get to see all that as well," he says.
SEE: Ellie Simmonds signs up to Strictly Come Dancing 2022
READ: The surprising reason Ade Adepitan and Linda had to postpone their wedding
His pride in being a dad matches his passion for being an athlete, which saw him win a bronze medal as part of the GB wheelchair basketball team at the Athens Paralympics in 2004.
He has also carved a successful career as a TV presenter, including covering the 2012 Paralympic Games.
"Being chosen to co-host the main Paralympics show for London 2012 was a personal highlight for me," he says. "I felt like I was representing everyone with a disability, but I also wanted us to find new audiences who wouldn't normally have engaged with para sport. That year was amazing, the Games gave the whole country a lift and left a real legacy. I'm really proud to have been a part of that."
Changing Times
“The fact that Paralympic gold medallist Ellie Simmonds is a part of the BBC's team for this year’s Commonwealth Games shows just how important 2012 was for increasing the profile of Paralympic athletes and disability sport. Audiences now celebrate a host of elite para athletes, whom they didn’t know before."
They have transformed their outdoors space with the help of a landscape gardener
Along with his TV commitments, Ade's life revolves around his small family. In between work projects – he has just filmed a follow-up to Our Changing Planet, the BBC1 natural history programme, which sees him return to Kenya to visit an elephant orphanage – the couple have enjoyed a summer of entertaining in their new outdoor space.
"We've got sun lounge chairs and bean bags, so friends and family can come over for big shindigs to test it all out," he says. "Ade keeps teasing me because I keep adding chairs and he says: 'How many people are you having round?'" adds Linda.
"She's turning our garden into a bloomin' restaurant – we’re going to need a licence," jokes Ade.
"We’ll be getting bouncers next."
With the help of a landscape gardener, the garden area was planted, made accessible and transformed into a luxury living space by online homewares, furniture and decor brand Wayfair, under the expert eye of its resident style advisor Nadia McCowan Hill.
"Our gardens are multi-functional spaces, used for everything from outdoor cooking and hosting playdates to drying laundry," she explains.
The family enjoying spending quality time together
The space has a dining table with a firepit in the middle for communal cooking, a bar with stools, a pergola, parasol, a swing chair for two, and a swing and sandpit (concealed in a picnic bench) for Bolla.
The little boy is "confident and sociable", according to his mum, and with a "really good sense of humour" says his dad.
"He also mimics, so we have to be careful of what we say," jokes Ade. For more information, visit wayfair.co.uk.
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