Reflections; A dialogue of Architecture and Landscape
Renewing New Forest Park through restraint, clarity and landscape‑led design.
At New Forest Park, the landscape is not something that sits behind the architecture, but the quiet presence that leads it. This remarkable stretch of New Forest parkland – shaped over centuries and praised as early as 1791 by the Reverend William Gilpin for its picturesque forest scenery – tells a long, layered story of adaptation rather than imposition. Agricultural land has been absorbed into parkland; vernacular structures softened by planting; designed interventions shaped by topography, hydrology and time.
What makes New Forest Park exceptional is not simply its beauty, but its continuity. Despite periods of loss and disruption, the essential character of the landscape endures: open pasture punctuated by veteran oaks, long views across falling ground, and a measured dialogue between built form and woodland edge. It is this coherence that underpins both its national designation and its ecological richness.
Our role at PAD studio has been to support a proposal that places landscape restoration and enhancement at its heart. Submitted under Paragraph 84e, the landscape-led application was described by the Case Officer at the Committee meeting as “outstanding and innovative” and as “enhancing the landscape” – language that carries particular weight in a protected national landscape such as the New Forest National Park.
Paragraph 84 exists to encourage this way of thinking: development that is exceptional not through object-making, but through care, restraint and long-term stewardship. At New Forest Park, that stewardship is fundamentally landscape-led. Kim Wilkie’s Landscape Masterplan reinstates and reinforces the park’s underlying logic:
- restoring openness and long views
- supporting tree succession and the continuity of wood pasture
- re-weaving ecological networks across grassland, water and woodland
- allowing agricultural function to sit quietly and comfortably within the landscape tradition
Alongside this, the project proposes the careful restoration of historic building, including the Grade II Listed Park Cottage and The Dairy, re-establishing them as legible elements within their original landscape settings. Heritage, here is understood as something spatial and relational – shaped by use, proximity and memory – rather than architectural in isolation. Throughout New Forest Park, the landscape has long been the unifying element.
Looking forward, the estate’s future is anchored by a new Estate Yard, designed by PAD studio as a contemporary, working heart from which the landscape will be managed and cared for. Purposefully modern in expression, the Estate Yard provides the infrastructure required for the daily life of the estate – agricultural activity, maintenance and stewardship – while remaining firmly grounded in its setting. It represents the future face of the park: practical, resilient and quietly confident, without drawing attention away from the landscape it supports.
The new main house, designed by Ben Pentreath, sits within this framework rather than apart from it. Its role is not to dominate, but to re-establish a clear and respectful relationship between dwelling, parkland and horizon – a relationship that had gradually been eroded over time. Landscape and architecture are conceived together, each informing the other.
This has been a genuinely collaborative endeavour. Alongside Kim Wilkie Studio and Ben Pentreath Ltd, the team has included Rob Hughes (planning), Price & Myers (structures), ecologists, historians and civil engineers, all working with a shared ambition: to enhance the integrity, legibility and long-term resilience of a nationally important landscape.
At PAD studio, we believe that the most sustainable architecture is that which becomes inseparable from the place it inhabits. At New Forest Park, success is not measured by what is noticed first, but by what feels settled, grounded and enduring – evolving gently over time, and quietly doing its work.