SUMMER 2024
ELCOME NOTE | 8.24
The peaches are ripe. Summer heat is breaking into evenings by the fire. This time of year, in all its brevity and golden light, is just delicious.
At home, we are in our second growing season in the vegetable garden and enjoying the wins and losses of producing our own food. Last year we were drowning in zucchini, this year it is TOMATOES, all kinds, so many. And so, with our notebooks and seed catalogs, we look with new hope at next year when we will calibrate it just right. Or—more likely—drown in some as-of-yet unknown vegetable.
For Studio Campo, this summer meant a return to analog (writing, gardening, reading, drawing), field work, the start of new work, the closure of gardens years in the making, and a reprieve from social media. With so much so-muchness out in world, I have had a good think on what we do well and what is enough. Going forward, we will be focusing our external communications on partnering with inspiring photographers and storytellers, and what you are reading right here: a well-written letter four times a year that hopefully shares a bit of our world and brightens a morning for you.
May this serve as sun-bleached toast to the last weeks of summer. Thank you for reading.
Cali
FARM DESIGN | 8.24
Agricultural Placemaking
We design farms. We also design gardens, parks, and hotels but farm and ranch planning is core to our business, accounting for roughly half of our active projects. There are agricultural elements (raised beds, chicken coops, orchards, hedgerows) in nearly all of our projects. The reason for this is simple: my family runs a farm. The family business—Left Coast Estate—now 20 years old, is ostensibly our youngest sibling. We fight and fawn over her in equal measure. What I know from co-owning a farm and designing many others is that the rules of thumb are quite different from other forms of landscape architecture.
What I would like to lay out here today are some informal principles for farm design and to provide some insight on how they might apply to non-farm projects. To begin, we are not agronomists and do not design farming practices; for that, we rely on client or third party expertise. What we do design is the framework for a farm, how it engages natural areas, how its circumnavigated, the plant and material palette, the choreography and guest experience, what the vision is and how—step by step— to get there. We will delve into 3 principles today and resume the dialogue in a future issue.
1) The Garden is the Pro Forma
Working on conventional landscape projects, it is very common for the landscape budget to get scaled back (sometimes wayback) when funds run dry. Landscape is viewed as a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. This is not true in farming. The garden, so to speak, is the pro forma. Structures on a farm are often utilitarian, secondary. There are pros and cons to this. The pros are that farmers have a vested interest in the land and its stewardship. They bring a complex understanding of the site, their crops, and maintenance. They tend to be realists and incredibly educated clients. On the cons side, farming is risky and debt-prone, increasingly so with extreme weather and rising labor costs. If the farm fails, so does the farmer. And many farmers have far more projects they would like to do than they have capacity for; it is a long game.
It is an enormous responsibility to plan a farm. The hope is that the farm will be self-sustaining, economically, environmentally, and operationally. Because of the inherent risk, we often do master planning exercises at the beginning of farm master plans to make sure the design will support the pro forma. This means looking at the farm’s desired yields / programs and assessing if / then scenarios to ensure that improvements to the farm can be supported by the business model. Landscape is a means to achieve the economic and strategic vision. For non-farm projects, we can look towards re-framing the value of the garden and outdoor spaces at large. Few of us aspire to spend more time in the TV room and yet we put the nicest couch and ample square footage towards it. Many farmers live modestly and farm richly. What can we glean from this? If we thought of landscape as elemental to daily life, how would it change our homes, our neighborhoods, our towns?
2) Integral Maintenance
There is no delusion of zero maintenance in farm design; farming is maintenance. As such, the conversation tends to be more nuisanced. We look at a spectrum of maintenance and more so than conventional projects, which partners to engage to achieve the vision. Partners might be governmental, like the local Watershed Council or a national partner like US Fish and Wildlife, or operational, like a land lease with a beekeeper or grass seed farmer. The overarching lens of this is farmers rarely expect to do everything themselves. There are outside contributors and stressors, from seasonal workforces to outbreaks or fires that require coordinated effort. This framework of partnership is helpful across landscape projects. Rather than trying to eliminate maintenance in landscape projects, we can shift the focus to what relationships and rituals we are building, be it with a carpenter who oils and refinishes furniture once a year or a child’s weekly chore of taking kitchen scraps out to the compost.
3) Longitudinal Thinking
Many farmers and farm owners see themselves as stewards of the land; they are there for a tenure (be it a decade or a lifetime) and the farm continues after them. The farm is bigger than them. If you strip a site’s top soil, you deprive the next generation the opportunity to farm. If you leach chemicals into the reservoir, you taint your own water supply. The consequences are direct and real. The result is that farm design often includes phasing plans, maintenance plans, contingency and succession plans, all so the property can thrive during and beyond current ownership.
The responsibility of land stewardship holds for all properties but it is a less common line of thinking in residential design. It can be a helpful shift in perspective. What does a property look like 10, 20, 100 years out? What is our responsibility to the land and its future tenants? How does the site function hydrologically? How resilient is it to environmental stressors? Does it speak to a sense of place? These are all common questions for agricultural properties that have value across landscape types. There is a fixation in America on increasing property values (which I totally get. Many of us put most of our net worth into our homes and I am no exception here). But our means and methods for doing so are often market driven, leading to uninspired decisions for a hypothetical future buyer, not by listening to the land or even our own needs and tastes. What if we tuned out the real estate agents and practical advice and stewarded our own little parcels into something resplendent, resilient, and maybe even a little bit weird? I would like to leave the door open to more idiosyncrasy and longitudinal thinking in landscape design.
If there are specific farm / agricultural design topics you’d like us to cover, send an email to [email protected].
MILLWORK | 7.24
New Futures with Sitka Spruce
at Two Capes Lookout
On the rugged Oregon Coast, Two Capes Lookout—a 60-acre hillside glamping resort with sweeping views of the ocean—is taking shape. The client team is a group of friends united by a vision to save this beautiful tract of old growth Sitka forest through low impact development and a fresh take on coastal hospitality. Phase 1 will include 15 geodesic domes and 4 mirrored cabins (link to a feature on OOD cabins in the Wall Street Journal below).
In the course of excavating the campground from a very steep site, three of these magnificent Sitka Spruce had to come down. A few of the youngest members of the client group (three adventurous boys) helped seal the end grain so they could be milled and reimagined as furniture pieces onsite. These logs are massive, up to 5’ in diameter.
Over the next couple of months, we will be milling and transforming these logs into fire pit seating, custom light bollards, and stump night stands for the guest units. Here are some photos of the process so far. A shout out to the branding team at Cognoscenti Creative who did a masterful job with the identity below and interior designer Max Humphrey who is collaborating with us on design.