Take FlighT: A Garden Inspired
by Movement

With far-reaching views across the Blackmore Vale, this small but quietly confident design brings elegance and energy to a previously overlooked corner of a beautiful garden on the outskirts of Shaftesbury. It would have been easy to leave this space untouched or treat it as an afterthought, but instead it was approached with care, curiosity, and a gentle sense of play, allowing its potential to slowly reveal itself.

Inspired by a bronze pheasant captured mid-flight, the design introduces movement through water and subtle curves, giving the sculpture both direction and purpose within the landscape. The shallow reflecting pool sits directly in line with the full-height hallway window by the front door, creating an immediate visual connection on arrival and drawing the eye outward into the garden beyond. Ripples are echoed through a restrained palette of Welsh slate and halved red bricks, laid in gentle curves with pockets left open for planting, texture, and natural rewilding over time.

A six-metre corten steel pool by AP Steel, complete with planting channels for mosses and grasses, anchors the space and grounds it within its wider setting. Its real beauty lies in patience — each year it softens, loosens, and edges ever closer to the wild landscape beyond, quietly blurring the boundary between designed and natural.