Fawn Hill – Mansion in May

Fawn Hill Farm Estate

A transition is a passage, which connects two themes or sections.  At the Fawn Hill Farm Estate, we have been given the opportunity to cohesively mend a natural blue stone veranda to the stately rear colonnaded terrace, an area, which for the last several decades has been dismissed and underappreciated.  Our design and installation will once again revive a lost corridor of the mansion.

Our space is not only a functional and aesthetic passage, but also a seamless transition from the adjacent living room to the overlooking views of the rolling pasture.  The areas newly handcrafted stone work will be softened with cascading layers of ornamental trees and shrubs and stellar perennial borders.  As dusk draws, our garden illuminates into a serene nightscape, which will be enjoyed from both inside and out of the mansion.

We began with just a lawn area and overgrown shrubs. The key to the project was making the area look as if it had been there all along and not newly installed.  We used reclaimed bricks for the walk to match the existing driveway.  The stone walls and stoop entrance was created to blend with the natural stone of the house and bluestone caps found on all the existing walls.  This entrance now brought people’s interest from the inside of the home out.  We built an arbor out of copper and we gave it an artificial patina to compliment the aged copper gutters on the house.  We bordered the pathways with splashes of color, different textured foliage and leaf color to appeal to the enthusiastic public visitors as they transitioned through our display.

This was a unique project for us for many reasons.  First and foremost, it is a charitable display that we installed to benefit the hospital as well as the visitors who came to appreciate creative designs, plants and craftsmanship.  We worked within a limited time frame to complete the job due to the fact that there are many vendors working in and around the particular site.  Also, access was extremely limited and we were careful not to disturb any existing areas of the mansion.  Therefore, all our work was done by hand.

The project also gave us an opportunity to work at the same site as many other professionals in the industry whom we had never met.  It was a bonding and learning experience for all of us from different parts of the state.  We had a lot of fun being creative, working with exceptional people and getting the opportunity to discuss the pride in our work with 20,000 visitors during the month.