Dumbarton Oaks Farrand House

In establishing a new academic precinct at Dumbarton Oaks, our work at Farrand House brings an overlooked corner of the site into the fold of the campus. Neighboring one of the most intact and significant works of Beatrix Farrand, honoring and extending the legacy of her work became especially important.

Gardener’s Court

Dumbarton Oaks serves as a home for the humanities and public horticulture. Beginning in 2019, we worked with Selldorf Architects to introduce new academic programming to the Gardener’s Court, a site supporting garden operations at the far western reaches of the Dumbarton Oaks campus. Including K-12 learning, a digital lab and an artist studio, visiting students and scholars will have the opportunity to draw upon the gardens and Library collection in their work. Working with leadership, we reframed and enhanced the Gardener’s Court as a landscape of welcome and engagement, revealing the horticultural operations as well as the scholarship that allow the institution to meet its mission.

Reestablishing Visual Connectivity

We conceived of the site plan as a choreographed series of terraces, vistas and horizons stepping down through the sloped site, framed by stone walls and tightly integrated with the building programming. The stacked relationships between these levels creates a layered set of intimate garden moments, paired with apertures and overlooks revealing long views, following many of the same logics that Farrand used to manage the steeply shifting topography within the gardens. The landscape design reestablishes visual connectivity to Dumbarton Oaks Park to the north, once the rugged and pastoral precinct of the Farrand landscape design. In siting the Farrand House and the Sycamore Court, we celebrated the adjacency to the historic Dell with framed views to the the bowl-shaped woodland connecting to the historic Service Court and Gardens.

Elements of the Historic Dumbarton Oaks Gardens

Other iconic elements and experiences of the historic Dumbarton Oaks gardens became reference points in our design of the Farrand House landscape. Flanking the western walkway, naturalistic lines of American Hornbeam pay homage to the historic Hornbeam Ellipse while offering a new interpretation of the form. The lower garden and terrace extending from the Farrand House’s artist studio and gallery is shaped around a bioretention basin nestled into the slope, following Farrand’s strategy of developing what was once a spring-fed “cow pond” into the Reflecting Pool and corresponding garden room. We worked with natural materials like granite treads and curbs, bluestone and wire-cut clay brick paving, and locally quarried schist wall stone, to reference the materials palette of the Gardens and honor Farrand’s legacy of expressing care through craftsmanship and proportion.

Planting Inspiration

The plantings at Farrand House invite engagement, observation and research, drawing forward the horticultural mission of the campus. Over 70 species are represented. We planted multiple species from genera such as Magnolia, Ilex, Rhododendron, Dryopteris and Carex, allowing direct observation of differences in leaf shape, flowering time, color, scent, and other plant qualities, subtly revealing the system of taxonomy among these plant “cousins”. The planting areas transition from horticulturally significant garden staples like camellia, skimmia, and spirea in beds near the building and terraces, to dogwoods, redbuds, witch hazel, and other native understory plantings at the surrounding woodland edges. We drew inspiration from Farrand’s valuable Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks in selecting species like southern magnolia, Carolina allspice, lilac and sumac, while introducing a variety of native species not previously used at the site to restore degraded habitat.