When we meet clients or contractors for the first time, we’re often asked a question I’ve come to dread: “How would you describe ALA’s style?” Are we formal? Sustainable? Naturalistic? English cottage garden-esque? Modernist?
For the last four years, I’ve struggled to answer. We’ve designed landscapes that fit each of those descriptors. We’ve installed rigid evergreen hedges, large drifts of ornamental grasses, exuberantly quixotic bulb-filled front gardens, and native woodland understories. However, to reduce any of these projects to a single stylistic label feels reductive - ignoring the site planning, contextual research, and design intent that shaped them.
Perhaps the best way to describe our approach is through the lens of a project currently in the planning phase.
On reconciling old + new, software, and pineapples
The Loom House is located on a 3-acre property east of the Hudson, along a busy road. Built in the early 19th century, glimmers of history are present throughout the house and landscape; a loom and wool carder in the attic, sloping pine floors, scattershot-style granite and schist stone walls, and a pervasive, crushing flatness from livestock grazing exacerbated by expanses of lawn. Meanwhile, more recent interventions - a garage/ADU (soon to be renovated), a tangle of invasive knotweed, and a deer-ravaged forest - pose an interesting challenge: how to reconcile the historic with the introduced.
We were fortunate to join the project team early on, as a part of a larger group of architects and designers whose main scope will be renovating the old house and ADU. Guidance from the team for the landscape came in the direction of the following missives: “overgrown and natural, secret garden vibes, refined rustic (but not farmhouse), dog friendly, joyful, with color and texture in mind”. Apart from its atmosphere, the landscape also needed to perform - buffering road noise, defining spaces for gathering, and restoring ecological function.
Our first site visit was illuminating. The circulation was confusing, with the entry to the main house inaccessible from the street and the main driveway leading only to the ADU. Back was front, and front was back. Contrary to many of the places in which we work, all of the interesting sights happened on the inside, with the exterior offering relatively little in terms of inspiring viewsheds. Even in winter, the lack of topography, a declining forest canopy, and a homogenized understory left little sense of place. A knotweed snarl was omnipresent. Put simply, it felt like there was nowhere that felt comfortable to be outside.
Our design process is rarely linear. Early planning sketches (and sketches and sketches) sought to reconcile the convoluted circulation and awkward axes imposed by the ADU and main house geometry. Sections worked through how the site’s relationship to the road could be made more palatable through landform, plantings, and fencing. We work between the one dimensional and three dimensional, moving from sketch to drafting software to 3D render to ‘prove’ our concept, and back again. There is no one golden software or drawing to design a garden, and using any one singular without exploring alternate modes sets the stage for massing that feels out of step with the scale of the property. The approach to massing and spatial relationships of site elements, however, needs to be underscored with a current of ‘style’ to tie these elements together.
In these moments, we like to look outside the typical spate of Pinterest boards to inform the conversation, diving into drawing from geology, art, and the unexpected. What are some ways in which artists and designers inject humor, joy, and contrast into their work?
Enter the Dunmore Pineapple.
Image courtesy of The National Trust for Scotland.
Once described as the most ‘bizarre building in Scotland,’ this 18th-century garden folly was built by the 4th Earl of Dunmore as a hothouse to grow, unsurprisingly, pineapples. The seriousness of the Palladian architecture of the ground floor is muted by the 46 foot intricately-carved pineapple situated atop it. It’s a tribute to the ridiculous, and we love it. Somehow the building is able to straddle function, humor, and craftsmanship as a modern relic.
We used the essence of this folly to inform how we approached the design of the landscape- creating zones of the garden that spatialized function in a clear, thoughtful, and joyous way. All of the unique exterior ‘rooms’ hint at the site’s context in unserious ways. Stones placed at curious junctions, embedded in a deck or at the top of a stair, evoke glacial erratics endemic to forests of the region. Straight hedges foregrounded by meadow planting jut into pathways just enough to provoke a reaction. Perfectly circular pools of water at grade with near-invisible coping interrupt the groundplane. Juxtapositions of curving and linear pathways blend the informal with formal.
Materiality of the spaces recall its ecological and historic underpinnings. Granite slivers form paving, and crushed granite composes the pathways. The plantings themselves do not follow the massing and geometry of the hardscape, softening any rigid forms. Contrast highlights the gesture of both.
Taken in isolation, any one of these design moves could be classified as modern, rustic, formal, informal, or naturalistic- but in classifying the entirety of the landscape plan with any one of these words on its own would be doing a disservice to the holistic undertaking of the design. A good design defies singular convention and takes into account every thing that makes the site what it is.
So perhaps it’s better to say we have no style - at least, not just one.
