Designer Dan Pearson OBE has announced that, after 23 years, he is closing his practice, Dan Pearson Studio. The company, which is based in London, will cease trading on Friday 11 September and plans are being put in place to finalise work on active projects for clients.
Dan, who has been designing landscapes and gardens since 1987, is the founder and Principal of the studio. His partner Huw Morgan is Managing Director, and they employ a team of nine.
They have both taken time away from the business in recent years, with Dan taking an extended sabbatical that included a trip to Mexico, and Huw taking a sabbatical to focus on charity and education initiatives he is passionate about.
Talking exclusively to Gardens Illustrated, Dan explained how they came to this decision. "I never set out to be running a busy practice… that kind of happened by default. We’ve been trying to maintain perspective on what is the right work to be doing. When I took my sabbatical, I had already started to ask: how can I take the skills that I’ve learned and hone them to be working much more closely with my strong belief that we have positive agency over our environment?
"I took the big leap after two years of working out whether it is the right thing to do and decided that this was the bravest and most definite thing to do: to take another pause, to give myself some breathing space, to think about what the next might move might be."
"I’m going to take a couple of years to refine," he says. "Refine my thinking, refine my work and my approach to it. It’s a sideways move, but not an end, at all. Refinement and being nimble are the two things I’m looking at.
"This period that I’m going into now is a period of reflection; not exactly metamorphosis, but refining who I am, what I do best, what I do well, making new connections with people who might be able to or might need my help with making places that resonate, and that have some real meaning, in terms of being able to work towards or nurturing our environment in a really well-thought-through way. It’s about moving away from garden design and more into ecology and conservation of landscape."
During Covid, Dan and Huw moved to their home and garden, Hillside in Somerset, full-time, and opened the garden more to groups, as well as holding working weekends and gardeners’ teas – invites to which are treasured among the gardening fraternity. The garden will form a core part of Dan's next chapter.
"This is not retirement; this is not an ending"
"I've been struggling to find enough time to garden Hillside, trying to get a Thursday gardening day. Not the weekend – a work day. It's time for me to engage again with the garden. But it was increasingly difficult to make that day happen, and the more it didn't happen, the more I thought, okay, I've got to really change things.
"There’s a richness to this place. The more you put into it, the richer it gets, and it feels like I need to nurture it. And from that, I will feel what the next move really needs to be."
Dan, who is also a contributing editor of Gardens Illustrated, has written a column and presented videos for the magazine over the past few years, as well as creating courses for Create Academy, and he and Huw recently transferred their free weekly blog DigDelve into a paid newsletter for subscribers.
"With DigDelve, we're going to look at making a film or a series of short films here. We’ll try and make it a little less virtual, so maybe something physical comes out of it - limited runs that are precious and not just throwaway; potentially working on a book. And allowing Hillside to become somewhere that's more accessible for our readership - maybe garden access for small groups, which would be focused around workshops."
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Besides his OBE, Dan holds many accolades including a Gold medal and Best in show for the Chatsworth Garden at RHS Chelsea 2015, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers.
The practice is known for creating spaces with a true sense of place and artistic naturalistic planting. Previous work includes the grounds of Lowther Castle, the Goodwood Art Foundation, the courtyard of the Garden Museum and Delos at Sissinghurst, as well as projects such as the Kings Cross regeneration and the Tokachi Millenium Forest in Japan, and numerous private gardens from the UK and America to China, Italy and Australia.
Ongoing projects include the Play Earth Park in Japan and the expansion of the Beth Chatto Gardens in Essex.
Dan's clients have been informed of the closure and plans are being put in place for any further developments on projects. "I'm keeping a close relationship with a small number of projects, so they're not affected. The Maggie’s Centre that we're doing in Bristol is currently going into planning, so before the studio closes its doors, we’re getting all the information we need together for that, and [chief executive] Laura Lee is then going to go out and do fundraising, which will take a couple of years. I think putting my energy into those kind of projects for people that need good environments, that feels like the right thing to do."
He will continue his ‘godparenting’ role at Sissinghurst, where he advises regularly, and move into that capacity at Beth Chatto Gardens as well, to mentor the team as they implement a new masterplan he revealed in August 2026 for the expansion of the garden, with an additional seven acres of woodland and meadow, as well as changes to the existing garden.
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For the ongoing greening project around the Garden Museum at Lambeth Green, Dan plans to set up a pro-bono relationship for it as it goes through planning and moves on to the fundraising stage.
"Lowther is in really good hands with head gardener Andrea Brunsendorf," he says. "It’s a long-term project: I’ve been working on that for 16 years. We always thought about the masterplan unravelling over 30 or 50 years. So a two-year pause while I'm taking this time to reflect is not a big pause."
Play Earth Park is a new nature-themed public park in Japan where Dan is creating a landscape aided by former Tokachi Millennium Forest head gardener Midori Shintani. "We’ve been running like mad to get that project to a state in which the team on the ground can pick that up. Midori and I are very close and there’s a good synergy there, with an easy shorthand in terms of decisions being made easily on the end of a phone," Dan explains.
"I want to make sure we nurture that into the next stage, and that will also be a long-term thing. In a couple of years’ time, I'll be going back to that and picking that up as I did the Tokachi Millennium Forest, with yearly visits and workshops with Midori, to make sure it’s being steered in the right direction."
Dan and Huw have informed the nine members of their team that the studio will be closing and tried to find ways to ease the transition. "They're a good team and it’s been one of the biggest hurdles for me to overcome in terms of making this decision," he admits, "because I’m responsible for those people. They’ve helped to enable what we do; they’re really important. They are enterprising people, so they’re already going out and talking to people, and we’re feeling confident about that.
"It’s a big nest that we’ve woven out of many different parts, and unpicking it without breaking anything is complicated."
"I've never set out to make an empire," Dan continues. "I don't want to be working on things that I don't really believe in, and I think I’ve got enough experience and knowledge to be able to work on things in a meaningful way with the right people, but on a smaller scale.
"When I started out, it was just me. I had one person working with me and people around me who could support what we were doing. And it may end up being much more like that," he reveals, explaining that he spent part of his sabbatical with Piet Oudolf, understanding how Piet has worked for years very effectively with a group of collaborators across the world, rather than running a practice.
"It’s a sideways move, but not an end, at all"
Although he is keen to shift his focus more onto landscape, and creating more "places with soul", Dan is not ruling out doing some residential garden design, for the right clients. "It depends who the person is and what the project is. If it's an interesting architect or an interesting client, I'm not going to say no if the interest is there. I think it's all about being able to sit down at a table with somebody and have a really exciting, interesting conversation that gets bigger and more dynamic for the power of there being these two different brains on the same thing."
Dan is also adamant that the closing of the studio should not be seen as him finishing his career. "This is not retirement; this is not an ending," he says. "This is the closing of one door and the opening of another. And it’s about things being deeper, more refined, more connected and more meaningful. Our work has always aimed to be that, but that’s the premise of my new approach to everything that we do."
