When the studio turned fifteen this winter, the question that kept coming up around the team was: what has changed in the way we work? The answer, surprisingly, was the first meeting.
On Practice
Fifteen years ago a first meeting with a client involved a tape measure, a clipboard and a fairly fast move toward concept sketches. Today it involves none of those things. The first meeting is now almost entirely a conversation, usually on the site, and almost entirely about how the client wants to live — not what they want the garden to look like.
“A short reflection on what fifteen years of residential garden practice has taught us about the first client meeting — and how much of the design happens there.”
We have learned, slowly, that the brief is almost never what the client says they want at the start. The brief is what they say in the third hour, when they have stopped editing themselves and started talking about the way their mother's garden smelled, or the corner of the site where the sun lands on a Sunday morning, or the fact that they secretly want somewhere to read alone.
The drawings that come out of those conversations are different drawings. They are the gardens we are most proud of.
Fifteen years has mostly taught us to talk less in the first meeting. The garden does most of its own talking once you let it.
