Conyers Farm Woodland Estate

Set within an old-growth American Beech and Oak woodland that a former owner's unfinished house construction had significantly damaged—a landscape wound appeared beyond surgical repair. HMWhite set out to recapture the inherent beauty and regenerate the site's ecological richness and performance. The clear-cut extent of the woodland presented a design opportunity. The building's architectural axial hierarchy and organization were projected into the open landscape context to create powerful physical and visual relationships between the landscape and the ground floor interior rooms.

A network of locally harvested fieldstone walls was organized to establish a landscape armature to spatially define various distinct outdoor rooms within the expansiveness of the open landscape. The garden architecture was used as building extensions inserted into the woodland to anchor the building's broad presence to its landscape setting. Both freestanding and retaining stone walls reference Connecticut's historic and familiar vernacular countryside. Their landscape design integration tamed the site's challenging and varying topographic conditions into a sequence of terraces, lawn panels, and sloped gardens. Ballasted stone retaining wall created overlooks that brought the house's domestic landscape close to the woodland edges, dramatizing this junction through its contrasting characteristics and differences between the tame and the wild landscapes. Garden rooms and landscape features were spatially organized within a hierarchical order of these axial principles. Within the large woodland scar, orthogonal arrangements of landscape typologies – bosques, allées, orchards, and lawn parterres were introduced as a transitional landscape framework to blur an abrupt junction with the surrounding woodland's majestic scale. This fusion of the old meeting the new created an instantaneous timeless landscape design composition.