Hollow Ridge Estate

The Hollow Ridge property came to us with a 1920s shingle house, an unstable lawn, and a deeply held instinct from the owners that the land deserved more careful treatment than it had received. The brief was simple: build a landscape that looks like it has always belonged.

Our master plan organized the property around three terraces stepping down to a meadow. The upper terrace holds a long table for outdoor dining; the middle terrace, an infinity-edge pool oriented to the western view; the lower terrace dissolves into native plantings and a working cutting garden.

Every wall on the property is dry-laid from Hudson Valley fieldstone, the stones collected from a single 80-acre field within ten miles of the site. The work was led by Daniel and two of his senior masons over fourteen months. There are 1,200 linear feet of wall, and no two stones are alike.

The planting palette draws from the surrounding Bedford landscape — black gum, sourwood, fothergilla, and a deep underplanting of native ferns. We installed nine 7” caliper specimen trees to give the property immediate scale. Five years on, the landscape reads as inevitable.