This garden was designed as an English Garden to suit the Tudor Architecture of the limestone mansion. The front garden includes a formal cobble main driveway as well as a parking courtyard for the garage area and service entrance. Countless boxwoods, yews, beech, and roses flank the front elevation of the home to create a mass planting simple yet classic approach to the home.
The ten acre area that contains the main garden on this 300 acre farm was stripped of all trees to create the dramatic grade change required to accommodate the walk outs, the pool garden and the rear terrace. Over 250,000 yards of clean fill was imported to create the grades surrounding the home. We placed 15,000 yards of screened topsoil to fine grade and sod the site. Hard surfaces were in excess of 30,000 square feet of natural stone with concrete foundations. We used a 90” tree spade to import over 500 mature trees to the property. The main entrance driveway is lined with eleven hundred beech trees which creates a really dramatic approach to this spectacular home and garden.
The back garden is a traditional English rose garden lined with boxwood hedges and turf pathways and open entertaining areas. Two rectangular reflecting pools were incorporated into the design to create a more dramatic backdrop when dining in the covered loggia or the rear dining terrace which is also equipped with a full outdoor kitchen.
The pool area was an engineering challenge in itself. The area was approx 22’ lower on one side than the other, and we decided to create a symmetrical design in this space. We spent a full winter creating the even grades and subsoil drainage system to ensure the pool elevation didn’t become a pond! The pool which is 30x90 has a 16x16 spa under water so it is not visible when its off. The spa is superheated underwater and cannot be detected when its off so the pool appears to be a large reflecting pond when not in use. There are over six hundred feet of hand cut limestone drywalls surrounding the pool, a 3500 square foot pool patio complete with a chefs outdoor kitchen, and over six hundred tons of large rockery set in behind the plantings to create the tiered garden effect we desired. The pool equipment is housed in an underground 1000 sqft bunker we designed and installed next to the outdoor kitchen so that the equipment would not be seen from the upper balconies of the home. |
