Meet the designers of The National Autistic Society Garden in the Show category at RHS Chelsea 2024
Sophie Parmenter
Sophie runs the Staffordshire-based Sophie Parmenter Studio, with public space planting and garden design projects throughout the UK. The studio focuses on a sustainable and regenerative approach to design that seeks to improve upon the existing biodiversity of a site, crafting a habitat-rich landscape where an imaginative, artistic approach to fulfilling a client’s needs also allows local wildlife to flourish.
Sophie’s approach is inspired by a lifelong love of wild places and natural landscapes, and she works with a small, specialist team of designers, CAD technicians, nurseries and craftspeople to create gardens or planted landscapes respectful of their unique location and history. Certain themes run through her work – generous and naturalistic planting, married with an innovative approach to traditional crafts and natural materials.
Sophie has recently taken on the stewardship of a small farm in Staffordshire. This will function as a ‘living lab’ where the studio’s work in both public space and private garden design will be complemented and informed by an experimental approach to regenerative land management and horticulture.
See the National Autistic Society Garden
Dido Milne (CSK Architects)
Dido is a director of CSK Architects in Eton, an architectural studio with a holistic approach to environmental sustainability. Together with her partner, Matthew Barnett Howland, Dido designed and built Cork House, a radical and widely acclaimed project that explores sustainability across the whole life of the building, from its origins in biodiverse cork forests through to its return to the earth in the far future. In 2019 Cork House was the winner of The Manser Medal AJ House of the Year, the American Institute of Architects’ Sustainable Future Award and the RIBA Stephen Lawrence Prize, and was shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize.
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