We are sometimes asked, politely, whether we are turning work away. The answer is that we are, and that we will keep doing so.
On Practice
The arithmetic is straightforward. A garden that is going to last forty years needs roughly two hundred hours of design attention from the lead designer over the first twelve months, and another hundred hours of site attention during build. Past a certain volume of projects per designer, those hours simply stop being available. The garden does not collapse — it just becomes a competent example of the kind of garden the studio usually makes, rather than the specific garden this client and this site were owed.
“A short note on why our studio caps the number of projects we begin each year, and what that means for the gardens we get to make.”
We cap intake at twelve new projects a year across two lead designers. That is not a marketing decision; it is the largest number where we can still answer the question "what would the right answer have been for this site?" instead of "what is the right answer that we already know how to make?"
The trade-off is a waitlist. The trade-off is also that the garden will be the right one.
