Words Lia Leendertz
Photography Evie Johnstone and  French + Tye

“The client gave us a feeling they wanted to create, which was generosity of space,” Darren explains. “The architect and I suggested an unconventional approach, that we would walk the site and peg out the best places for each cabin rather than start by drawing. We discovered 17 perfect locations and these are where the cabins now sit.”

The cabins (five of which have already sold, with 12 plots still available) are beautifully designed, minimalist styling and careful, quality detailing, all framing those views across country to the bay at Polzeath. It was Darren’s job to create privacy, a sense of cohesion, a link to that amazing wider landscape, but also a little something extra. He felt it was important to make these gardens entrancing, particularly as they may well be used as holiday homes, giving people a break from their busy lives.

“Lives are so hectic and there is so much distraction that I think gardens need to be transformative, so that as we pass through those spaces we are calmed and engaged. This might be a scent or the way you step over some plants or the light through a flower, they need to provide that moment that makes you look and appreciate. Just that is enough to lesson your blood pressure calm the mind and shift you into a different place.”

And it is a particularly special sense of place that Darren and his team have created at The Point. He felt strongly that the usual fences and hedges wouldn’t work here, and so he borrowed from the surrounding landscape and created a series of Cornish hedges, traditional boundary features comprising two parallel stone walls filled with soil and planted up, found in various styles throughout the county.

“They are artistic and very useful, and they have given the site a visual and aesthetic identity very quickly. There are no strong boundaries between cabins and instead these Cornish hedges loosely define the spaces. But at no point do you feel like there are issues with privacy. It feels like a community but not hemmed in, there is that feeling of generosity.”

This connection with the landscape was of paramount important in the brief and has also informed Darren’s choice of plants. “I first looked for trees with their own architectural merit, so that each has brought a sculptural quality and enhanced the sense of being in a beautifully curated space: trees with good shape, windblown trees, pines that had been grown hard, and multi-stemmed trees.” These include slow growing dwarf pine Pinus mugo and dwarf elm Ulmus minor ‘Jacqueline Hillier’, whose tight, contorted forms mimic the trees occurring naturally in the hedgerows and fields around the site that have been bonsaid and pruned by the effects of the salt wind blowing off of the sea.

Other plants echoing the landscape are ornamental grasses such as Lessing feather grass, Stipa lessengiana, and Chinese silver grass Miscanthus sinensis ‘Malepartus’, both of which add almost constant movement and are interplanted with colourful perennials including burnet (Sanguisorba) and spear thistle (Cirsium) for blasts of colour through the year. Although none of the planting can really be called formal, there are some mown communal areas that give way to rougher grass, and then to colourful meadow planting, which blends into shrubs and trees and out into the landscape.

The meadow areas are far from the only features designed with an eye towards habitat creation. One of the most impressive is a huge swale, or ditch, that runs through the site. “The soil is very thin here, with sedimentary rock just 40cm below the surface in some places,” says Darren. “The weather is very wet in winter and very dry in summer. We wanted to find ways to help the land to hold on to water in the wetter months, to slow the release of it off of the land and into a nearby stream – and then into the sea – but also to create habitats with it.” All of the contours of the land have been shaped so that water runs towards a huge pond and pockets of wetland that will, as the planting matures, provide habitats for a great diversity of mammals and insects.

Grappling with creative ways of dealing with contours and changes of level is something that has come to be a bit of a speciality for Darren and his landscape studio, out of necessity. “I used to live in London and when I moved to Cornwall about 18 years ago I had to very quickly learn how to create gardens on really challenging, steeply sloping sites.” His design studio – comprising four garden designers – now designs a great diversity of gardens all over the country but, Darren emphasises, “we get really excited by levels and challenging sites. We are often lucky enough to be working waterside, and on cliff-edge properties. These can be really difficult and you are addressing changes of level, dealing with access issues and tricky logistics, but the design payoff is huge.”

The landscape at The Point has given Darren and his team the chance to work in a way that they most enjoy. “We love to take natural materials and use them in an unfussy but highly detailed way so that we show off the material and the craftsmanship, and love to create really fluid designs. Our gardens are rarely formal, and there is a generosity of space and embracing of informality. We have a strong appreciation of nature and always want to be building gardens that create biodiversity, and this garden has had this at its heart.”

He credits the client for giving he and the architect so much support and freedom. “We had a free reign but then the whole project was driven forward by the enthusiasm and commitment of the client. It is a formula that has led to the creation of a very special place indeed.”

Of the 12 plots remaining, some are built and some are to order, giving buyers the opportunity to part-design the interiors. There is a cabin available to rent over the summer, which is also for sale. For more information, view our listing page.

Darren’s podcast, The Garden Design Confessional, is a series in which Darren talks to fellow designers and landscape architects about what inspires them and how their design process has developed over the years.