Students on our BA (Hons) Interior Design course carried out a live brief with Fen End Farm in Cottenham to create shelters – and ended up with some of their ideas shown at Sandringham Flower Show.
In conjunction with Headway Cambridge & Peterborough, Fen End Farm hosts a project supporting social and therapeutic horticulture for adults with brain injury, and invited proposals from our students on the theme of shelter.
The students came up with many interesting and thought-provoking proposals, many of which were achievable on the farm itself — but when the farm was invited to design and build a show garden at Sandringham Flower Show, they decided to include some of the more challenging ideas from the students.
After playing with ideas from a couple of the designs, they came up with a small one-person shelter constructed from dry stone and a woven willow roof that allowed in sound and light. Simon Lacey, the owner/manager of Fen End Farm, told us:
“Those who saw it and ventured inside described it as a sanctuary, a place to disappear but where one might still somehow feel present and included... One person likened it to a weighted blanket — often used to calm and soothe — in the form of a built structure.
The structure raised lots of interest and prompted many questions including from the judges — we won gold and best in the Large Garden category.
We spoke about the project with ARU as the inspiration for the structure — it was a central element to the garden, exploring the tension between being connected and separated and how to accommodate both needs in a complex group such as ours.”