06Landscape designConcept project
Alder & Vale
Slow work, sold slowly.
- Year
- 2026
- Typical timeline
- 6 weeks
- Sector
- Landscape design
- Live site
- Visit the site (opens in a new tab)
- Work completed
- Art directionWeb designCopywritingWeb developmentMotion
Alder & Vale does not exist. It is a landscape design and build studio in Hampshire, and a site made for work that takes years to finish and decades to judge — where the fastest possible enquiry is not the point.
The brief
A brief we set ourselves: a studio that designs, builds and then tends private gardens and estates across the South of England, takes twelve a year, and keeps clients for a decade and more.
01Challenge
The problem worth solving
Garden design sits awkwardly online. The work photographs beautifully in June and looks like nothing in February, the money involved is closer to an extension than to a service, and most studios answer with a gallery and a contact form. None of that tells a prospective client the thing they actually need to know: who will be on site, and who will still be coming back in ten years.
Objectives
- 01Show a garden as it really is — across a year, not in one photograph
- 02Make the case for one studio drawing, building and tending
- 03Qualify hard: say how many gardens are taken a year
- 04Earn a written enquiry rather than harvest a form fill
02Strategy
The approach we took
We opened with the argument the studio actually makes: one garden, photographed through four seasons, changing as you scroll. From there the page follows the shape of the work — the studio, the approach, four gardens with their counties and acreages, four stages with the weeks each takes, and the materials named down to the stone and the yew. The enquiry is an email address and a phone number, on purpose: work at this scale starts with a letter, not a lead capture.
03Design
How it looks, and why
Bone paper, ink text and a moss green held back for almost nothing, with clay as the only warm accent. One typeface throughout, set large and loose, with italics saved for the turn in each sentence. Photography does the rest: full-bleed, seasonal, and quiet enough that the marquee of plant names — molinia, hornbeam, yorkstone, birch — reads as a plant list rather than decoration.
Display
9664402416
Palette
- Ink#141A11
- Bone#EFEBE2
- Moss#2B3623
- Clay#A9542E
Grid — 12 col / 8px
04Development
How it was built
One page, and everything on it resolves: twenty-one in-page links, no dead ends. The hero is a scroll-driven sequence, four full-bleed seasons pinned in place while the page moves under them, built with GSAP over a smooth-scroll layer.
Key features
- 01A hero that carries one garden through four seasons as you scroll
- 02Four gardens, each with its county, year and acreage
- 03Four stages with the weeks each takes — and stewardship marked “indefinite”
- 04A materials palette named down to the stone, the steel and the yew
- 05Dated field notes in place of a blog
- 06An email address and a phone number in place of an enquiry form
05Results
What was built
A studio that does not exist has no gardens to show for it. What the site has is the argument: a garden shown across a year rather than at its best, a process priced in weeks and seasons, and an enquiry that asks for a letter. Every figure below can be checked on the live site.
Concept project — Alder & Vale is fictional, but its website is live, and the figures below are measured from it rather than modelled. Check them on the live site (opens in a new tab)
- 4 Seasons of one garden, in the hero
- 12 Gardens a year, said out loud
- 0 Dead links of 21 in-page links
- 1 Page, from hero to enquiry
Slow work, sold slowly — on a site patient enough to let a garden argue for itself.
