Principles
Provenance
For a landscape to be experienced and felt, it needs a sense of place. We seek to deeply understand the original fabric of a site, as well as the architectural built form. From climate and topography to history and locality, this understanding informs and inspires a sensitive and authentic response.
Collaboration
Relationships are key to creating a harmonious connection between people and nature. Every Barber project is a collaboration, with clients, specialist practitioners, craftspeople and growers. Low on ego, Barber’s personal connection with our clients and contractors is at the heart of our ability to create successful and unique natural spaces that feel good.
Creative Pragmatism
We are experimental but grounded in pragmatism. Our consistency of approach is balanced by what we call our “unique creative”. Rather than impose a formulaic house style, we always strive for new creative expressions unique to client and site. Rooted in deep practical knowledge, they are delivered with an open, honest and a no-nonsense approach.
Nature Heals
Immersion in nature and it’s role in our wellness is central to Barber’s practice, as both a personal passion for Sam and a prime driver in our landscape responses. Whether it is respite or restoration, we pursue subtle tailored landscapes that provide harmony and ease, reducing stress, enhancing wellbeing and healing through materials, colour, texture and a harmonious connection between people and nature.
Salutogenesis
Salutogenics sees health as a continuum, focusing on creating health and resistance to stresses rather than curing illness. Following Salutogenic design principles can push us along the journey towards more robust health. For example through community, by configuring space for social interaction and participation. Also through individual empowerment, by imbuing a sense of meaning, coherence and control. The increased role of Salutogenic design means architects and landscape architects have become “the public health practitioners of the design world.” (Dr. Richard Jackson)
Biophilia
“Biophilic design is the deliberate attempt to translate an understanding of the inherent human affinity to affiliate with natural systems and processes (Wilson 1984, Kellert and Wilson 1993)—into the design of the built environment.” This understanding means consideration and application of a diverse, complex, and multi-sensory approach to design including light and shadow, rhythm, movement, views, aromas, shape, material, and the properties of a space that evoke refuge, mystery and awe.
Rewilding
Opportunities exist on every site, from urban to rural, to echo or to fully embrace the wilderness once present. We have built our rewilding know-how through experience, study and collaboration with experts and growers. Where desirable, we bring to each project bespoke strategies to reference, restore or harmoniously blend indigenous ecosystems within contemporary design.
Sensory Experience
The attention we pay to the effects environments have on mind and body means all sensory elements are deeply considered during our process. To trigger healing responses our designs encompass tactile moments, circulation of air and scents, interplay of light across space and daily solar rhythms, sound and movement. The effect of volume, sightlines and refuge within an environment are also crucial design aspects that although often unnoticed have a great impact on the condition of those within.
Accessibility
While historically our projects have been for HNW clients only, our position is not one of exclusivity. We are a highly considered studio and now our offer is accessible to a broader demographic. Our brand is humble, understated, engaged and cutting edge. We have rigorously developed our processes to enable a far greater reach for project types and delivery.
Connection to People
A fundamental purpose of the design and programming of our projects is to inspire and grow connections. We create a fertile environment for all types of connections: personal; family; occupational; business; social; recreational; professional; community; mentor-mentee; and more. Connections are very often the most powerful mechanism to boosting wellness, providing support, joy, encouragement, meaning, familiarity, self-worth, security, and the mutually reciprocative, positively re-enforcing and rewarding feeling of imparting these benefits to others.
Restoration
Landscape and design has long played a role in healing, by mechanisms that are only recently far better understood. Our approach has always focused on the ability of environments to nurture, invigorate and support. Paying attention to the social fabric around us has made clear the increasingly deep need for restorative support, our work’s contribution to this is more important now than ever before.
Holistic Health Practice
Having worked with leaders from the essential pillars of holistic wellbeing, our studio provides a handpicked array of health offers within a sculptural, biophilic setting for all manner of project types. Our inclusions are (not limited to) active recreation, gyms and spaces that are tailored to facilitate specific training types, meditation, hot and cold therapy, a variety of movement studios as well as more clinical treatments. Places to train, release, relax, relate & restore. Places that make you feel good.
Imperfection
Imperfection makes us unique and provides us with the opportunities to evolve positively should we choose to embrace it. Imperfection can be expressed through cracks or breaks, through heterogeneity or by the simple incompleteness of an otherwise perfect circle. Our studio philosophy is to embrace people’s imperfections and idiosyncrasies and create spaces that encourage positive living.
Transitions
A site must function as a unified, harmonious system. By working from a whole-of-site perspective we allow the connections and interdependencies to reveal themselves, becoming the underlying foundation of our design responses. This philosophy goes beyond physical movement around site, considering also visual, social and human-nature connections
Materiality
Our buildings & landscapes are designed to endure, providing sanctuary and refuge long into the future. Trees grow, materials weather, this is all part of the design, where materials are not only selected to last but to reflect some of the changing landscape around them. We work closely with suppliers and installers to ensure that the highest standards of quality and craftsmanship are met in assembling these elements.
