Wren Hollow

The owners of Wren Hollow brought us a folder of glass-plate photographs taken on the property between 1898 and 1912 and asked if we could rebuild what they showed. The photographs had been their grandmother’s. The garden in the photographs had been gone for sixty years.

We worked with the NJ Historic Preservation Office to confirm the original parterre footprint from the foundation lines visible under the lawn. The boxwood parterre — fifty Belgian box, hand-pruned twice a year — sits exactly where it sat in 1898, and the gravel paths are graded to the same drainage falls.

The orchard is twenty-eight heritage apple trees, sourced over three years from a half-dozen growers across the Northeast. The cultivars match a hand-written list from the property’s 1903 ledger: Roxbury Russet, Esopus Spitzenburg, Northern Spy, Ashmead’s Kernel. The owners now press their own cider.

Five years on, the project has aged into itself. The clients have told us, more than once, that it is the calmest place they have ever lived.