Jeremy Fillmore and Ryan Talbot, of Northland Design Group, created this storybook retreat with a team of talented pros, including Clayton Vance, Jackson & Leroy and Artistic Stone. The Northland team designed and located garden structures as part of the conceptualized landscape design and called upon Vance, who used them to inform his historically inspired designs of the property’s massed structures—a stylized thunder shack, a pavilion-like cottage, and the stacked-stone walls that connect them. These purposeful elements are beautiful in their own right; in combination they are enchanting.
“The design is broken into usable spaces,” says Fillmore, who created a stream-like water feature and small terrace on the wooded slope between the main house and the transformed site above. “It’s like an invitation that brings you up to the property,” he remarks. From there, visitors arrive at an oval lawn crowned with a curved arbor from which three wooden garden swings hang, overlooking the entire landscape. The uniquely curved design does more than delight. “Unlike a straight structure, the shape allows people to interact face-to-face while swinging,” Fillmore explains. The garden swing structure is graced with traditional hanging gas lanterns that also act as way-finding elements as one walks through and discovers the site.
