While Stimson operates as a collaborative, with three fellow principals sharing leadership with Lauren and Stephen and a trusted team of 40 clustering on about 120 projects a year, its ethos flows directly from the couple and their divergent approaches. Good design, like a good marriage, requires compromise—and time. Commissioned gardens tend to unfold over years with extensive illustrations and planning. (This collaborative approach has attracted AD100 firms like Ashe Leandro, Clements Design, Olson Kundig, and RP Miller.)
At their own home, the Stimsons improvise, their limited resources fueling creativity. (“We have similar tastes to our clients,” Lauren says with a wry smile, “just not the same budgets.”) When the couple acquired the property, they focused on sensitively reclaiming the land from overgrowth and invasive species, but drew no master plan, preferring to let things evolve organically. Since then, they’ve added a grange hall and a studio (designed by OPAL architects) that accommodates on-site colleagues. The rest of the firm works remotely or out of a loft office in Cambridge.
Charbrook marks a homecoming for Stephen, whose family once stewarded some of this land and also owned a sprawling dairy farm down the road, with roots stretching back 12 generations. (Stimson now operates its own nursery on 12 acres of the old tract, while nephews manage the rest.) Lauren grew up roaming the woods just two towns over. Her parents, who met when her father served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, prompting her mother to immigrate to the United States, now live across the street from Charbrook.
Stephen launched the first iteration of the firm on Cape Cod in 1992. Now, more than 30 years on, its portfolio rolls wide and deep, linking extraordinary New England and Northeast private homes with innovative public projects. Such ambitious endeavors range from Phil Hardberger Park in San Antonio, Texas, where they restored an endangered oak savanna and brush forest ecosystem on a mile-wide swath of former cattle ranch, to crafting a new comprehensive accessibility plan for Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and rebuilding a natural riverbed after a centuries-old dam and reservoir recently failed in Cleveland’s Doan Brook watershed. The firm has also overseen myriad projects on the campuses of Harvard, Brown, Northeastern, MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Lauren and Stephen’s alma mater, where they recently helped establish a scholarship fund for BIPOC landscape architecture candidates in an effort to invite deeper diversity into the field).
