Originally featured in Landscape Architect and Specifier News
A Wingate landscape and design story shaped by stone, timber, water, and mountain light — rebuilt here as a digital editorial feature.
Original magazine cover
Feature opener
This feature began as a photographed magazine spread, published in Landscape Architect and Specifier News. Rather than leave it trapped in print, we rebuilt it here as a readable editorial page — preserving the spirit of the original feature while giving it the clarity and permanence of the web.
At its center is a Berkshire property shaped through Wingate’s sense of proportion, texture, and landscape continuity: stone that feels rooted, water that guides movement, outdoor rooms that feel discovered rather than imposed, and interiors that echo the same quiet material language.
Editorial body
The project’s power comes from restraint. Rather than competing with the Berkshires, the design reads the site first: the slope, the ridgeline, the existing stone language, and the way outdoor movement naturally wants to unfold from one threshold to the next.
That sensibility carries through every gesture. Architectural materials are not treated as decoration, but as cues — layered stone, timber, warm surfaces, and carefully framed transitions that make the house and grounds feel like they belong to each other. Multiple tiered staircases and retaining walls mitigate significant grade changes throughout the property, with precast stone caps used for the retaining walls and stair treads.
Water features, terraces, and edge conditions do more than beautify the property. They organize the experience of arrival and circulation, giving the landscape rhythm. The result is not a series of separate moments, but a sequence: approach, threshold, pause, reveal. As the article describes it, an existing hollowed-out oval rock formation was moved to the top of a rock outcropping, where it now serves as a wishing well and the source for a new waterfall.
The strongest outdoor spaces feel inhabited without feeling overbuilt. Pergolas, terraces, walls, and planted edges create places to sit, gather, and look outward, but never at the expense of the mountain atmosphere that made the property compelling in the first place.
That balance is what gives the work its lasting quality. Around the pool, orderly and architectonic stone walls were laid out at a uniform sitting height to define the space as a distinct exterior room. It is formal where it should be, natural where it should be, and always calibrated to how people actually move through the site.
Even in print, the original article made clear that this was not just a styling exercise. It was a whole-property composition — one where interiors, hardscape, planting, and sightlines were treated as parts of the same conversation.
From the magazine
Continue exploring
This editorial remake sits between Wingate’s project work and its press archive. If you want the project context, continue to Mountain Chateau. If you want the broader record of features and recognition, visit Press.
