We practice architecture and landscape architecture because we love designing and good design is important to us. People and place are at the heart of what we do. We take pleasure in ensuring that our designs reflect the distinctiveness of a place, of a client and of a client’s needs. Whether we are designing a building or a landscape we look to design in context, both historical and visual, seeing design as the management of change in that what is created changes places and changes relationships; relationships that need to be managed in the interest of a creating a harmonious and sustainable entity.
We believe in the importance of detail and as a practice have always taken a ‘hands on’ approach – often literally – to what we do. We enjoy working at both the broad, landscape scale bringing together a range of disciplines and at the intimate scale of a small building, an extension or a restoration where the quality of the whole is so strongly affected by the quality of the detail.
Because we want to conserve the character and cultural distinctiveness of places, whether a landscape or a townscape, we have been much involved in promoting, undertaking and implementing countryside and urban character assessment and management plans for a wide range of projects including landed estates, historic parks and gardens, university campuses and the public realm of towns and cities.
